


When I Met You In The Summer

by NorroenDyrd



Series: Remedios' Remedy [1]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Aunt-Niece Relationship, Backstory, Bathing/Washing, Coming of Age, Daedra Worship, Dark Magic, Deception, Disease, Drama, Elemental Magic, Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Family Drama, Father-Daughter Relationship, Female Friendship, First Love, First Time, Gore, Imprisonment, Insecurity, Investigations, Learning Magic, Loss of Innocence, Loss of Limbs, Loss of Virginity, Loving Marriage, Magic, Mind Control, Murder, Mysterious Death, Necromancy, Nudity, POV Alternating, POV First Person, POV Multiple, POV Original Character, POV Third Person, Peasant Life, Physical Abuse, Plague, Platonic Relationships, Poisoning, Pre-Canon, Resentment, Revenge, Self-Hatred, Sexual Slavery, Sibling Rivalry, Sister-Sister Relationship, Starvation, Teenage Drama, The Only Cure Quest, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Vampire Sex, Vampire Thrall, Vampires, Village life, Visions, mild swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-20
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-06-03 10:58:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 17
Words: 44,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6608149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NorroenDyrd/pseuds/NorroenDyrd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What began as a happy summer evening soon turned into a downward spiral into darkness - a woeful tale of revenge plots, magic duels, solitary confinement, and the dark desires of Daedra worshippers, which molded the future Dragonborn and Dark Brotherhood assassin into the person she is now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It is summer in High Rock, and the ancient forest at the foothills of the Druadach Mountains is filling up with a heady, greenish-gold haze, with tiny specks of sunlight floating in it, like bubbles racing towards the surface of a goblet filled with honeyed wine… Ha. Wine. I thought I had forgotten how to properly use mortal similes, and expected myself to compare this weather to something that was more familiar to me – but I guess that following my prey so closely has rubbed off on me, and I am still capable of thinking like a mortal might.  
  
The air is dense with the smell of flowers and moss, and the steady ripples of scent grow only more poignant with an occasional whiff of animal musk, as some glassy-eyed deer trots by, with its thoughts focused on searching a mate – followed closely by a prowling wolf, with its thoughts focused on catching the deer. My senses sharpened by the Gift, I am aware of all the goings-on in the furry kingdom – and they amuse me greatly. For they are such a perfect mirror of the plan that I have devised.  
  
The giant, moss-covered trees, which must have been nurtured here centuries ago by the Wyrd Sisters, cast off a pleasant shade, which provides me with a welcome relief from this never-ending feast of sunlight. I stand perfectly still, blending in with the shifting, dark-green shadows, and watch, and listen, and wait.  
  
And then, they finally arrive, just like they always do, emerging from the heart of the forest. The girl comes first, dancing barefoot along the narrow woodland path, a basket with various alchemical whatnots tucked away under her arm. The man follows, leaning on a snarled wooden cane for support – and I cannot help but bare my teeth in glee when I take a closer look at him.  
  
The years have not been kind to my enemy. Throughout all this time, I myself have remained the same, greeting moonrise after moonrise with barely a hint at weariness, and sometimes even restoring my former youth after a long and proper feast – while the mortal has transformed from that young, noisy, arrogant pup to a withered shade, bent over with age, and limping, too, his body having never properly gotten over the gnarled mess of old injuries. His hair, once long and wavy, shaded the same delicious dark red as the life juice within his veins (ah, now that is a simile more to my liking!), is now reduced to a few measley, greying patches, exposing a tall, wrinkled forehead. His fingers are twisted like the twigs on a dying tree, and certainly not capable of aiming a crossbow like he once did… When he came bursting into my coven’s cave, oh so brawny and brash, inebriated by his own heroics.  
  
I squint my eyes, gliding noiselessly behind the protective shield of the tree trunks, never letting the man and the girl out of my sight – but at the same time, allowing myself to get a little distracted; letting the memories flood into my mind and burn through it like deadly acid. Even after all these years, I feel the pain as keenly as ever; I have kept it festering within my heart, nursed it, never let it fade away. And now I need that pain more than ever. To remind me why I am here.  
  
Oh by Lord Bal, I can recall it all now. How we all gathered together, the blood kin from the farthest reaches of our native marsh, celebrating the wonderful catch that the youngest brethren, myself included, had just made. How the cattle – a female and two children, strong, hearty Nords, with soft cheeks warmed by fresh, healthy blood – squirmed in their binds, and made all sorts of delightful gargling noises, as tears of desperation and helplessness clogged up their noses and rolled into their ears and mouths. How I received an approving smile from the usually stern, cold matriarch, the venerable leader of the coven and the generous mother that had granted me my new life. And then… how _he_ crashed down the door, and trampled over all our protective traps like a bear on a rampage. And how the family gathering turned into a slaughter.  
  
We had already begun getting our first tastes of the meal – slow, appetizing nibbles at the she-Nord’s wrists – and thus, we were ill-prepared for the intrusion. Before the eldest members of the coven sprung up to arms, the mortal had already managed to fell several of the fledglings. Oh dark moons, how their eyes widened in terror as each of them staggered back, a crossbow bolt lodged firmly in his or her flesh, and then crumbled away into ash!..  
  
I remember one in particular – my favourite huntsmate, who in life had been a Bosmeri dancer… an elegant, playful little thing, who liked lulling her prey to a pleasant daze with kisses and gentle touches before gorging herself full and giggling apologetically every time a little burp escaped her bloodied lips. The swift, merciless bolt hit her in the eye, as she turned around in alarm to face the trespasser. As she shrieked in inhuman pain, her soft features peeled back like the shed skin of a serpent, exposing the steep cheekbone angles and long, sharp teeth; she stumbled towards the mortal blindly, clawing at the air in front of her and hissing threateningly – and then froze, as the second bolt reached her heart.  
  
She was followed by so, so many more, as the horrible, heart-rending destruction escalated – for when the mortal ran out of bolts, he slung it carelessly behind his back, and switched to fire magic; and the bright, stinging tongues lashed at anyone who came near, leaving them reeling and vulnerable to the finishing thrusts of a ghostly, shimmering conjured blade.  
  
One by one, they all fell, the matriarch included. My beloved cave was ravaged by flames, and my perfect life under the cold aegis of the twin moons was over. I myself barely escaped the inferno; disoriented, stupefied with grief and pain, I crawled out into the marshes while the accursed mortal wretch was cleaving his way through the remainders of my coven. And ever since then, I have been doing what I am doing now, in this wild, blindingly green forest. I have been watching, and listening, and waiting.  
  
Unbeknownst to him, I have been following the man who destroyed my family during all his life. I have been that tingling feeling against the back of his neck that, more than once, has made him whirl around in alarm only to find himself staring into nothingness. I have been that shadow in the corner of his eye that he has never been able to look at directly. I have been that painful silence that made him feel paranoid when he was all alone in a room, haunted by the suspicion that he actually wasn’t.  
  
And I have kept from revealing myself, much as I was tempted to, much as it would have pleased me to cast back the cloak of shadow, and to wring my enemy’s neck. Because it was not yet time.  
  
As I followed him in silence, I saw him succumb to scars and weariness, and set aside his crossbow and his spell tomes, and settle down in the middle of nowhere, in a tiny hamlet lost in the woods of High Rock, close to the Skyrim border. But even when I could take advantage of his old age, and amuse myself by torturing him and knowing that he would be too weak to strike back – even then, I did not reveal myself. Because it was not yet time.  
  
I have seen him court the daughter of a modest, unassuming villager; I have seen him get married and sire this little thing that is now following him, with her mahogany hair flowing behind her shoulders just like his used to, outlined in gold by sunlight. And now… now I think it might be time.  
  
The girl stops halfway down the path, waiting for her father, and calls out, in a carefree, chirping voice,  
  
‘Come on, one more time, Papa! Before we get back home!’  
  
‘Stendarr’s mercy, girl!’ the man chuckles, waving his stick at her in a mock threat. ‘Stop being so cruel to your poor father!’  
  
Then, after a pause, during which he looks long and hard into the girl’s pleading face, he adds in resignation,  
  
‘Ah, fine! Have it your way!’  
  
With that, he rolls up his sleeves and leans forward, while the girl tosses down the basket and bounces on one spot in excitement.  
  
The man waggles his fingers, rounding his eyes in an exceptionally ridiculous grimace, and then casts a magical ward in front of him – a see-through wall of what appears to be light turned liquid. The girl crinkles her nose in concentration – and tosses a tiny, rather lop-sided ball of flame, like one might toss an ordinary leather ball in the game of catch.  
  
The ball hits the ward, which erupts into a shower of blue sparks that float slowly to the ground and melt away like snowflakes, making the girl clap her hands as she watches.  
  
Her father gives her a small smile – not unlike the smile granted to me by my matron, before _he_ cut her down. The wave of hatred crashed against my chest with such violent force that I almost betray my presence; thankfully, my enemy is too busy lecturing his daughter to suspect that something is amiss.  
  
‘Yes, yes, you did well, Remedios – now, pick up the ingredients! What were you thinking, strewing them about like that! We will need them for tonight’s experiments, remember?’  
  
‘Mama and Aunt Gervaise will complain about the smell again’, the girl remarks, giggling, as she squats down and sweeps the various roots and toadstools back into the basket.  
  
‘The have every right to complain,’ the man reasons, shuffling towards her to lend her a hand. ‘When I married your mother, I made a promise to give up all my, uh, adventuring nonsense, and become a regular old villager that doesn’t poke beyond his tiny land plot unless absolutely necessary. And I haven’t exactly been true to my promise, now have I? Telling you stories of my former antics, teaching you magic and alchemy, while you should be doing your chores…’  
  
The girl snorts, blowing a loose strand of hair out of her face.  
  
‘Why did you marry Mama anyway?’ she asks. ‘She is too boring for you! All she cares about is who is whose cousin and how many times removed… And what it means if you had a dream about eating cabbage soup!’  
  
‘Hey now, don’t be like that!’ the man protests. ‘I married your mother because I wanted to start a family! To do something else apart from killing goblins and harpies and whatnots!’  
  
Whatnots! Is he referring to my kin with this careless slur? How dare he, after all he did!... But patience. It will not be much longer now.  
  
‘Besides, she was so pretty… And so calm and… steady-headed – quite unlike my own self, with my mess of a life. I couldn’t help but fall in love with her…’  
  
He cuts himself short.  
  
‘Eh – you are too young to think about things like love! I bet you are still sure boys are icky!’  
  
The girl says nothing – but I can tell from the look on her face that her father is wrong… No wonder really – mortals’ lives are so short and fleeting that they want their offspring to remain children forever. But the girl is no child – she is in her seventeenth year now (I have counted), and blooming, as young blood courses through her veins.  
  
It is this swift, happy flow of blood, heady like the summer air around me, that I shall take advantage of. Seduce the child, turn her against her own family – and then watch her father groan in pain as his world crumbles apart, just as mine did… But for that, I shall need a more appealing form. I have not fed properly in a long time, and my skin is pallid like that of a drowned corpse. Ah, too bad that there are no other human settlements close by, and this one is so small that any missing person will be soon accounted for. Although… there is one that could prove of use: a hunter that goes off to track game for days on end. His blood is fresh and hot, keeping him strong and making the village girls swoon when he passes by… It will be the perfect remedy to give me the likeness of this girl’s peer. A dreamy, impeccably handsome young man that little short of sparkles in the starlight.  
  
Yes, this will do.  
  
This will do quite nicely.


	2. Chapter 2

Remedios Saavedra, age seventeen (well, it’s actually sixteen and four months, but she likes rounding it up), sticks her tongue out in concentration and readjusts the mirror that she has brought with herself to the bathhouse – a rickety little building, leaning against the wicker fence a few yards away from the family’s main home. Inside, this age-old structure is almost completely barren – save for a few barrels, a stone stove for heating up bath water, and a bench where you are supposed to leave folded-up clothes and towels. It is here that Remedios placed the mirror before she began to wash herself, propping it up against the dark, soot-smeared wall; and now that she is done, feeling clean and fresh and flushed, she has plopped back towards the bench, the creaky, slippery boards bending in under her weight – and instead of throwing on her clothes in impatient haste, like she usually does, she has taken to fussing over the mirror, her heart racing with something more than just the heat of a long bath.  
  
The milky breath of the steaming water has made the glassy surface cloud over – so, first and foremost, Remedios wipes it clean with the back of her hand – but not before tracing her finger against the mirror and making a simplistic drawing of a smiling face. After a few moments of thought, she complements the drawing with a few squiggly lines that are supposed to represent a messy mane of hair, quite like her own; and then, and only then, does she brush her hand against the glass, chuckling to herself in blissful contentment.   
  
With the smoky veil gone, Remedios can peer inside the mirror to inspect her lanky, naked self. The bath house has only one window, a tiny square cut through the wood, and it does not let through a lot of light; this makes Remedios’ expression change into a displeased frown; flicking her wrist like her father taught her, she lights up a shimmering, bluish spark of mage fire, which somewhat dispels the dense, earthy murk around her. Now she can finally take a proper look at her reflection!  
  
Of course, what she sees could have been better – if the descriptions of beautiful women you read in books are worth looking up to… But in all, she is not too shabby, if she does say so herself! Lean and graceful, with a flat stomach and slender wrists and ankles… If only she could do something about those freckles! All these scorching summer afternoons spent frolicking about in the forest, with Papa panting somewhere behind her – they have certainly left a mark on her face and arms… Gods, it looks like tiny ants are crawling all over her! She will have to research a poultice of some kind that will help her get rid of those pesky specks; her body absolutely must reach a perfect shade of alabaster!  
  
And ugh, those… unmentionable spots!.. Remedios flinches as she passes her hand against the prickly sores under her arms and below her stomach. Until recently, she was not too bothered by the hair that covered her body in certain places – but now that she has set her mind on looking perfect, those icky little wires began to irritate her. She had to pilfer her father’s razor to get rid of them – with little success. The legs were easier to cleanse – but when she switched to her upper body, the razor took to jerking about in her clumsy hands, leaving nicks and cuts in its wake. Of course, she could have asked Mama to help her shave – she would have understood; maybe, she would even have been delighted to see her daughter behave like a ‘proper young maiden that cares about her looks’ instead of an ‘unruly wild thing’… But no. She has to keep it all a secret. Nobody has to know. Not Mama, not Papa, not anyone.  
  
Nobody has to know why she sneaked the mirror into the bathhouse with her, wrapped inside a towel; nobody has to know why there were a number of tiny phials stuffed deep into the pocket of her apron – which she is now fishing out, one by one, out of the messy bundle of discarded clothing, and pouring their contents over her arms, with little to no clue whether that is what she’s actually supposed to do with stuff. And nobody has to know what these contents are – aromatic oils, which she distilled as best she could from woodland flowers, using her father’s old alchemical equipment and guidelines from the dusty lore tomes he still keeps around as reminders of his adventuring days. Nobody has to know why she uses the towel and comb so ferociously to dry and straighten her tangled hair – and why, as she begins to get dressed into fresh, clean clothing, she keeps swirling round and round and round in front of the mirror till she feels dizzy.   
  
Nobody has to know about her secret – her very own, private adventure, nothing like Papa’s overdramatic stories about how he alone faced down a swarm of giant wasps or how a giant almost ate him for dinner… but still just exciting!  
  
Actually, it was not her idea to keep it all a secret. If given a chance, she would have climbed onto the roof of the highest building in the village, and swung from the chimney, and sung, loud and clear of what happened and how she feels about it… But she was told not to tell anyone – ‘not yet’, and so, she is keeping her mouth shut. She cannot say that it is easy – especially with Papa, who has been the faithful keeper of all her secrets since she was able to talk… But on the other hand, it adds a whole new shade of thrill to this glorious, incredible feeling… Of being in love.   
  
Oh, yes, gods, yes – she is in love! She chants it to herself as, finally dressed, she gives her reflection one final look and tucks the mirror away into the dirty cloth pile; she even claps her hands and makes a small leap on the spot, almost making the half-rotted floor collapse.  
  
And she is not just in love – she is part of a perfect, enchanting love story! Living a fairy-tale that other girls will only read about in books! Oh, if she could, she would have reached up to the heavens and hugged Mother Mara, the goddess of love, for granting her this wonderful boon!  
  
It all began in a forest clearing, bathed in silvery moonlight. She and Papa had gone out to catch some torchbugs for one of their potion-making sessions (ah, how Mama fussed over them straying away from the village so late at night!) – but they had gotten separated, because Remedios thought she saw the most precious-looking deer watching them from the thick undergrowth, and left the path in order to investigate. But then, the deer turned out to be a bush, with two twigs sticking out at a bizarre angle like antlers… and when she turned back, intending to call out to her father and share a laugh with him over how silly she was, she realized that she had no idea where she was.  
  
If it were daytime, it would have been no big deal – she had gotten lost in the forest plenty of times before, and always found her way back, making Mama swoon in a fit of anxiety and Papa give her a stern, but proud look. But at night, everything looked so different – like she had stepped into a whole different world, filled with hissing whispers and inky-black shadows that crawled about as though they had a mind of their own.  
  
Of course, she was too stubborn to allow herself to feel afraid, and kept trying to untangle the ghostly, eerie net that the forest had cast on her, telling herself again and again that she was _not_ feeling a painful knot throb in her stomach, and there were _no_ tears beginning to well up in her eyes every time she thought she could see her father beckoning to her, but ended up stumbling against yet another deceptive bush. But still, there inevitably came a moment when she stumbled to a halt, and lowered her head in resignation, ready to acknowledge the fact that the forest had outwitted her… And just as it did, the clearing she had wandered onto filled with a billowing, creamy sort of mist, denser and darker than the vapour rising over the sleeping earth.  
  
And out of that mist, stepped a dark figure, tall and robed – for some foolish reason, Remedios found it menacing at first glance, and even thought she saw a pair of eyes glowing underneath the large, cone-like hood, bright as a pair of embers and yet possessing none of their homely warmth. It was an absolutely ridiculous thought to have, of course – because soon enough, the figure drew closer, appearing to glide over the rippling stream of mist towards Remedios (and to think that her stupid legs decided to get glued to the spot and grow all numb and cold, as if with dread!). And when she and the strange figure found themselves face to face, it became quite clear that there was nothing to be afraid of: the hood slipped back, and revealed the most divinely beautiful face she had ever seen… A face that she is now constantly seeing before her mind’s eye, her heart brimming over with indescribably happiness.  
  
Oh, he is so handsome, the man of her dreams! Like a chiseled marble statue that you might expect to see in some wealthy Imperial’s garden, surrounded by trickling fountains and fragrant blossoms… There is not a single asymmetrical line in his perfect face, and his skin is that very shade of alabaster that she herself is so bent on achieving. His long, sleek black hair is streaming down his shoulders, like soft, silk ribbons, and his eyes are deep, so very deep, the colour of moneyed mead, which she plunges in every time she meets his gaze, and merges quite drunk, dizzy and giggling and swaying right into his arms, which hold her strong but tender, making her wish for the heady, happy feeling to last forever!..  
  
It has already been a while since their paths first crossed; back then, he bowed to her in greeting and, courteous and soft-spoken, offered to lead her back to the village – ‘for it does not befit such a lovely maiden to be wandering alone in the dark’. Flattered beyond measure by his chivalry, Remedios could not wait to introduce him to her father – but as soon as she heard his voice, calling out to her from the path, the beautiful stranger bid her farewell, promising that they would meet again. And so they have; they have met many, many more times, always alone and undisturbed by anyone; sometimes in the shade of the trees in the forest, sometimes on the outskirts of the village, and sometimes late at night at a rendezvous place he set for her. She is still a little vague why the newcomer is reluctant to meet the rest of the community – he may have some business to attend to, or something… But it doesn’t really matter, because the important thing it, she can have him all for herself! She can listen, uninterrupted, as he praises her beauty, using long, sophisticated words that she either never heard at all, or read once or twice in a book and forgot; and she can enjoy his kisses, which began as courteous touches of his perfectly shaped lips against her hand, but seem to be steadily moving upwards with each meeting. She does wonder – how will he kiss her tonight?..  
  
‘What do you think you’re up to, young lady?’  
  
A shrill, croaking voice shatters through Remedios’ reverie as she steps out of the bathhouse and heads back towards the main building, the clothes bundle (and the mirror within it) thrust under her arm. The girl rolls up her eyes, avoiding the steady glare of her aunt, a withered old woman in a tightly buttoned-up dress, whose portrait should be printed in dictionary articles that define ‘stick in the mud’.  
  
‘I am not up to anything, Aunt Gervaise! I just decided to take a quick bath before bed!’  
  
The old woman chews at her lips, narrowing her eyes in suspicion.   
  
‘And why would you do that? You bathed just this morning!’  
  
Remedios tries and fails to suppress a snort of laughter.  
  
‘Because it feels nice to be clean? You should really try it sometime; you might even attract a suitor and stop being jealous of Mama!’  
Aunt Gervaise’s back reaches a whole new degree of rigid stiffness.  
  
‘I am not jealous of my sister!’ she exclaims, clearly affronted. ‘I pity her! For not only the poor thing married some _adventurer_ layabout that refuses to abandon his ways – but she also birthed a vain little strumpet that will soon drain our well dry by pampering her wicked body!’  
  
Remedios’ cheeks flush; the word ‘wicked’ has made her think of her mystery lover’s kisses once again, and quite in spite of herself, her mind has wandered off to what he might think when he sees what she herself just saw in the mirror. For she fully intends to steer him down that path; she cannot wait to explore even more facets of this heavenly feeling – she cannot wait to become a woman!  
  
Taking a deep, loud breath, she huggles her clothing bundle close to her and races off into the house, slamming the door shut behind her. Once inside, she sweeps past some blurred human figure (she thinks it is her grandfather, wandering about looking for rats again) and, after stunning it with a loud ‘Good night!’, rushes into her room, returns the mirror to its rightful place, her hands shaking with impatience, throws the dirty clothes carelessly on the floor and dives into her bed, just as she is, fully dressed. For (quite naturally!) she has no intention of going to sleep. She just needs to wait a while until everyone else in the household settles down for the night… Hopefully, she won’t have to wait too long, because her heart is racing so fast that it feels like her chest will explode any minute! Oh, hurry up and fall asleep, the lot of you!  
  
Finally, through the thin wall that separates her nook from her parents’ room, she hears the screech-like creak of the enormous family-heirloom bed, which she so loved to leap into in the mornings when she was about five or six years old – and some snatches of drowsy pillow-talk, too.  
  
‘I wonder what Bastian is up to?’ the voice is muffled, but Remedios thinks it is her mother. ‘It has been days! He has never been so long on a hunt before! I always say it is dangerous to go too deep into the woods’  
  
‘Meh, for all his muscled swagger, that fellow is what the Nords would call a milk-drinker!’ Papa grouses in reply. ‘He does not know the meaning of “too deep into the woods”! I am sure he’ll be back with some boring story about how he shot a very dangerous rabbit! And all the girls around will gasp and fan themselves as if it was a dragon! The standards of bravery are so low around here!’  
  
‘I think Bastian is just brave enough for this village,’ Mama responds. ‘In fact, we should invite him to dinner some time. He would make a fine suitor for Remedios’.  
  
The girl has to smoosh her face hard against her pillow in order not to burst out laughing. Oh, dear, sweet, innocent Mama! If only she knew!’


	3. Chapter 3

_As I finally hear Papa’s funny, gurgling snores in the room next to mine, I slide off my bed; my heart contracts painfully when the mattress creaks, and I stand tensely still, in perfect silence, with my hands clapped against my mouth, and my fingers seeming to be so cold against my burning face… But nothing else disturbs the peace and quiet of our house, other than the drowsy song of a cricket somewhere. Nobody has heard me – and now my heart soars with relief instead. With a practiced ease (really, I have done it so often that I could be going about with my eyes closed!), I squeeze through my window and jump down onto the soft, slightly wet grass. I spread my shoulders and take a huge breath of the fresh night-time air…_  
  
Carried away by her reminiscences, Remedios inhales deeply – and begins coughing, tears welling up in her eyes. For now it is the dusk of the next day, and she is no longer outside, enjoying the breeze. She has locked herself in the tiny closet, which used to contain brooms and other household whatnots, until Papa converted it into an alchemy lab.  
  
Potion-brewing is one of those life-long passions that Saavedra Senior refused to abandon even after he supposedly ‘settled down’ and took an indefinite vacation from ‘gallivanting about across the countryside’, as some of the other family members like to call it. And his daughter has been privy to his elaborate experiments ever since those distant days (yes, very distant! After all, she is far from a little girl now!) when she crawled about in her swaddling clothes, a tiny milk tooth sticking out of her mouth and a ridiculous frilly cap barely holding back her ever-growing mane of hair, while Papa was frantically trying to prevent her from stuffing suspicious-looking roots into her mouth.   
  
When Remedios grew old enough to understand that potion ingredients are not toys or potential snacks but key components of an incredibly exciting pastime, her father granted her a very special present – her very own key to the laboratory; which she has now put to use, for the solution that she is trying to concoct must be kept a secret… Just like the other chapters of her captivating love story…  
  
Remedios waves her hand through the air, trying to dispel some of the fumes that rise from the bubbling liquid in the flask in front of her; then, she stands on tiptoe to reach for some bowls with ground-up bonemeal on the upper shelf – and freezes just as she is, with her fingers clasped around her prize, lost in thought again.  
  
 _The cold, invigorating (hah! Smart word! I have picked up so many smart words while trying to match up to my beloved’s superior wisdom and intellect) touch of the night fills me with doubled energy, and as I race across the front lawn and leap over the fence, I cannot even feel the ground underneath my feet. And to think that when I first met the man of my dreams, I was so afraid of getting lost in the dark! But he has told me so many times that only fools fear the coming of the night, and if something bad happens to those fools, it is only because they deserve it. Because in reality, there is nothing to be afraid of. The night is worth of admiration, not cowering and slobbering in the corner. The night brings deep, enchanting colour to everything around us, and scatters glimmering jewels across the sky, and brings forth the two glorious moons, with mesmerizing (another smart word!) patterns traced across their faces. The night is mysterious, and romantic, and infinitely beautiful – just as he is. My beloved; the treasure of my heart, the centre of my world. And as I hurry forth to meet him, I am no longer held back by silly, childish thoughts of what will happen if I stray off the path._  
  
Finally, Remedios shakes off some of the dazzling spell that her own memories keep casting on her, and moves away from the shelf, setting the bonemeal down in front of the alchemical apparatus. The fine, silvery-white powder seems to glow in the laboratory’s murk, making her think of the moons and stars she saw in the sky on her way to meet her love. She smiles as she takes a pinch of it and lets it flow through her fingers into the flask. Papa always keeps calling bonemeal a dangerous ingredient, best suited for deadly poisons… But it looks like even Papa can be wrong! She knows this now. She knows more than Papa – for the lover of her life has been generous enough to share his infinite wisdom with her.  
  
 _In a flash, I race towards the little grove on the outskirts of the village, where we have arranged to meet. He is already there, waiting for me – and when I see the familiar outlines of his figure, my face almost splits apart with a broad, gleeful smile. He steps forward, and smiles back at me in greeting; this smile goes to my head, making the entire world around me spin in a wild dance, with the ground vanishing from beneath my feet and getting replaced by a deep, deep starry abyss. I get hurtled right into this pulsing starlight, almost sinking into a swoon – but he, my dearest heart, catches me before I can fall; and so, instead of swallowing me whole, the starlight concentrates inside my chest, and blinds me, and makes me do foolish, foolish things…  
  
The utter happiness of being with my love gives me confidence, and I am completely unashamed of my foolishness, and enjoy every second of it. Following the burning, dazzling glow within me, I cling on to my treasured sweetheart, wrapping both my arms and legs around him and pressing my mouth against his. I close my eyes, and feel my entire self melt away into a kiss, and work very, very hard to make it last as long as possible, while my heart hammers inside me like a giant war drum.  
  
I don’t want to draw away; I want this moment to last forever – but eventually, my love breaks the kiss and looks down at me, his lips still parted.  
  
‘Your temperament tonight is as fiery as your luscious hair, fairest one,’ he says in his low, velvety voice that never fails to make a giddy throb race through my entire body.  
  
Breathing heavily in tune with the triumphant music inside me, I speak the words that I was practicing inside my mind this whole evening, while I was bathing, and rubbing oils into my skin, and fretting so much over looking perfect.  
  
‘I love you. I love you more than my life, my family, or this wonderful world we live in. I have never loved anyone more than you, and I never will. I want you to make me yours’.  
  
For a moment, it seems to me that my words make his eyes flash – in a very odd, unsettling way, a little bit like the eyes of a cat that is too full, having just nibbled on some juicy, meaty treats, and does not want to eat the poor, shivering little mouse that is has caught... but decides to keep tearing at it with its claws nonetheless. This fills me with the same dumb, inexplicable dread that mounted inside me when I caught a first glimpse of my beloved in the moonlit clearing; but I quickly suppress the feeling. This is just my stupid mind playing tricks of me – just like the minds of those fools that fear the night. But I am better than this; I shall not make a fool of myself; and I shall embrace the night and all that it has to offer.  
  
And to my utmost pride, I manage to overcome myself, and suppress the instinctive impulse to push him back when he holds me close once again, and lays me gently down on the ground, and thrusts his finger underneath the laces that hold my bodice together, lifting them up slightly with his nail… Like a cat would play with a mouse’s tail with its claws?_  
  
Remedios shakes her head disdainfully, recalling all those silly thoughts that crossed her mind back then. It’s good that she did not show her misgivings outwardly, or else she would have offended him, and that would have been awfully unfair – for he was so gentle, so considerate, making sure that he did not hurt her too much, and looking positively surprised when she, sweating and feverish, pressed herself against his cold, smooth-skinned, lithe body, and begged for more.  
  
And gods, how he apologized when, after finally giving in to her requests, he became so passionate that his kiss on the neck accidentally turned into a bite! He kept inspecting the mark his teeth had left (which was not too deep, by the way, and has almost healed by now, as Remedios reminds herself while rubbing as it slightly with her fingertips), and repeating that it was ‘too early’… She is not quite certain what he meant by that – perhaps that it was too early for him to make love to her like to an experienced woman, with all those… naughty things she caught peeks of in certain books, of the kind that Mama would hit Papa on the head with when she found them stuffed inside his pillow and he tried to explain to her that it was just ‘old loot’ that had ‘sentimental value’.  
  
And then he was sweet enough to apologize for apologizing, and said…   
  
Remedios snickers excitedly into her fist, recollecting what her beloved told her.  
  
 _‘I enjoy your company tremendously, my precious jewel, and I will be happy to treat you with the love and tender passion that you deserve,’ he breathes gently into my ear, as I lay in his arms, exhausted and drowsy, as though I had just had a very hearty meal… No, a whole humungous feast!_  
  
‘But there is one thing that troubles me. I do not want your family to find out about… us just yet, for I still have certain business to attend to before I introduce myself. And now that we have grown even closer, secrecy is more important than ever, lest your elders think that I am some sort of scoundrel that takes advantage of you’.  
  
‘I know you aren’t!’ I sing happily, giving him a long, tight hug.  
  
He runs his fingers through my hair (which has become awfully messy again, with twigs and things sticking out of it from all that rolling in the grass!). His voice is as calm and soft as his caresses, but once again, the look in his eyes unsettles me a little… Probably because I am halfway towards drifting off to sleep and begin seeing things.  
  
‘Still,’ he insists, ‘Extra precautions have to be taken… for the time being. I know of a sleeping draught, which is really potent, but absolutely harmless in the long run. You could start slipping it into your family’s evening meals, to be absolutely certain that they are not alerted by you going off to meet me. What do you think, sweetness?’  
  
Ah, of course she thought a marvelous idea! Every idea that comes out of his brilliant head is absolutely marvelous! He has given her the recipe for the draught, and she has made sure that Mama allows her to help prepare the meal tonight! They will be having cream-and-mushroom soup – Grandfather’s favourite, since the poor dear has so very few teeth left – and Remedios was tasked with ‘putting that alchemical craziness at least to some use’ and finding some herbs to spice up the meal. Well, these are not exactly herbs, but they will certainly spice things up – for her! Because once everyone falls faaaaaast asleep, she will be meeting her lover, and… Oooh by Dibella, she cannot wait! She can never wait!  
  
Remedios glances at the notes that her love scribbled for her when he got dressed again and took some writing supplies out of his sache, and then shifts her gaze to the hissing, spewing flask. Everything seems to be in order; even with all the distractions caused by happy reminiscences, she has checked and double-checked the exact proportions of every ingredient. Wouldn’t want to mess something up and accidentally cause Mama, Papa, Grandfather, and Aunt Gervaise to die in their sleep or something, now would she?  
  
Rubbing her hands in gleeful anticipation, Remedios reaches for a clean flask and carefully pours the sleeping draught into it. Just as she is about to scrape up the last drop, she hears the shrill voice of her aunt calling out from beyond the door,  
  
‘Stop dallying, girl! The meal is getting cold!’  
  
‘Coming!’ she calls back, mentally saluting herself for not starting at Aunt Gervaise’s summons and spilling the precious potion. Everything is going according to her beloved’s plan – and she is so, so happy to know that she is not disappointing him so far!  
  
Grinning from ear to ear, she bursts out of the closet, almost knocking her poor aunt off her feet. Ignoring the worthy old lady’s indignant fist-shaking, her over-excited niece speeds past her into the kitchen, which also serves the family as the dining room.  
  
The huge cast-iron pot has already been taken off the fire and is steaming beckoningly in the middle of the table, while Mama is carving up a loaf of bread. As Remedios slips behind her back (which if rather broad, for since the days of her youth, the loveable, apple-cheeked matron has done little exercise except for exchanging gossip), this obscures her from the sight of everyone else in the kitchen. A perfect opportunity to dump all the contents of her phial into the pot! The bubbling noise that the draught makes, when mixing with the soup, causes Mama to look up and ask,  
  
‘Oh, Meme darling – have you added the herbs?’  
  
Remedios flinches. ‘Meme’ is a fond nickname, coined by Papa when she was still a toddler; she does wish everyone stopped using it all the time! She is a woman now, after all! But… they don’t know it yet. Still, the sound of that silly endearment rather diminishes her recently acquired sense of self-importance – which is why her response to her mother is more curt than she intended (she may be a clucking hen most of the time, but she does love her Mama!).  
  
‘Yes, Mother. I have’.  
  
‘All raish!’ Grandfather exclaims cheerfully (with his lack of teeth giving him a slight lisp), as he straightens himself up in his chair at the head of the table and drums at the wooden surface with a spoon. ‘Let ush give thansh to the godsh and shtart on the shoop!’  
  
‘Uuuuh, wait a second!’ Remedios cuts in, slipping the empty phial, unnoticed, into her pocket. ‘I forgot to wash my hands! I will be back in a bit!’  
  
Of course, she has no intention to come back. The plan is to leave the house and go to the newest exciting meeting place her beloved found for them – a mysterious cave in the heart of the forest, no less! While she is away, the family will eventually grow tired of waiting for her and begin the meal… and fall asleep, never realizing that she is not even here! Oooh, she is so ingenious!  
  
Her plan does work – at least, in part. Soon after she vanishes, Aunt Gervaise begins to grumble and drone into Papa Saavedra’s ear about his ‘irresponsible offspring’ – and in order to calm her down (and to prevent Grandfather from drooling into his empty plate), Mama declares that they might as well starting eating without Remedios…   
  
But she barely starts pouring around generous helpings of creamy, nutritious soup, when another rushed newcomer bursts into the kitchen, flushed and barely able to breathe. It is one of their neighbours; and the sight of his glistening, reddened forehead, wild hair, and dark circles of sweat beneath his arms makes Gervaise curl her lips in distaste. She is about to start another grumbling tirade, when the man stumbles forward and wheezes, addressing Remedios’ Papa,  
  
‘Horacio! Come quick! We need someone like you! Someone who’s seen… weird things!’  
  
‘What is it, Jean?’ Horacio asks, pushing back his plate, with concern written in deep lines on his face.  
  
‘We…’ Jean pants, ‘We… We found Bastian!’


	4. Chapter 4

Once upon a time, so long ago that now it is almost frightening to think this far back, there was an adventurer who travelled far and wide, all across the province High Rock and well beyond its borders. He had been on the road ever since he was but a skinny, scabby-kneed lad with a face drowning in a sea of freckles; and for as long as he could remember, the only home he had was the blanket that he carried with him in his pack, spreading it out underneath the stars in some ruined castle’s courtyard or underneath a giant tree or in the shade of an overhanging cliff – and the only friends he knew were strangers that he came across in his travels, never refusing to share a meal in a forest clearing or to save someone’s home from an imp infestation.  
  
For many years, the adventurer was content with the lot of a wilderness dweller: always on the move, always ready to practice whatever fighting and spell-casting skills he had picked up, always keeping his eyes wide open in anticipation of new impressions and knowledge; with no property to tie him down, no lord to pay taxes to, and no relatives to fret over him if, say, he stayed out in the rain for too long. But it just so happened that he did not belong to one of the meric races, with their ability to keep walking the mortal plane for centuries on end; no, he was a human – a stray mongrel with a mixture of Imperial and Breton blood flowing through his veins. And even the tiny shed of elven heritage that still lives on in the Breton race could not sustain him indefinitely; as time rolled past him, in an endless string of sunsets that he could not hold back, he began to grow old. His skin turned into a gnarled carpet of scars, some ripe-purple in colour, and some shaded a pale, sickly white; his muscles, strained by engaging countless foes in swordplay, grew weak and flabby; and his bones, worn by the weight of armour and loot, began to ache whenever the weather took a turn for the worse – and his leg, which he broke while being chased by the colossal metallic guardian of an old Dwemer ruin, never grew whole again.  
  
It was then, at the dusk of his adventuring days that he wandered, forlorn and tired, into a small, sleepy village, tucked away into the lush, endless green forest close to the border between High Rock and Skyrim – so removed from the rest of Tamriel that the people in it had only a vague notion of what was going on elsewhere in the Empire, and barely concerned themselves with anything else but their own troubles, which seldom grew more dramatic than pigs trampling over someone’s fence. And it was in that village that the adventurer sought shelter, feeling more than fed up with the excitement of clearing out haunted ruins and challenging rogue sorcerers to duels. He was taken in by a kindly peasant named Etienne, who had two daughters; the older, Gervaise, was long-faced and always frowning, never approving of anything that was said or done by anyone other than herself – but the younger… Oh, the younger of the two sisters, the sweet, sweet Annette, captivated the adventurer’s heart: she was just so… so homely – not plain, no; but rather delighted by quiet, content life, and making everyone who stayed in her cottage long enough feel the same delight. She was so absorbed in the simple village life, and derived so much enjoyment from something as simple as waking up to the sound of cockcrow, that she inspired the world-weary adventurer to stay behind with her, finally getting a roof over his head, a lovely kitchen garden that had to be watered regularly, and a handful of (rather smelly, but, for once, not bent on tearing him limp from limb) farm critters that had to be looked after.   
  
And he was happy. So very, very happy.   
  
He still is – even though sometimes, he goes out into the wilderness with his little daughter and teaches her smatterings of what he once knew. But these little expeditions of theirs, no matter how much old Gervaise waggles her tongue and calls them ‘insane’ and ‘dangerous’ feel more like an innocent, carefree game; and the sugar-coated stories of his heroics that he tells her are like echoes of distant dreams, with time blurring out all the dark colours and leaving only light, pastel shades that mesmerize little Meme and make bright sparks light up within her deep green eyes, which she inherited from his darling Annette.  
  
His sweet, precious girl does not need to know that adventuring is not all about happy frolicking in the countryside and seeing amazing new places. It is about long treks through unforgiving wastelands and sleeping on hard ground, and facing the most unimaginable horrors that the gods or the Daedra come up with, so that others may rest easy behind their city walls. In here, in this sheltered little hamlet, his Meme will be safe; she will never know how much fear and loss and suffering a life in the wilds entails; she will not have to see the darker side of adventuring like her father did…  
  
Or so he thought.  
  
Because now, after he has followed the rasping, panting Jean into the house of the village’s only guard (a wobbly-kneed, drowsy fellow with a wrinkled, prune-like goiter and long drooping white moustache), he has found himself face to face with the very thing that he has been trying to push back into the furthest corner of his memory, and to conceal from his cherished child. And this fills his heart with a cold, numb, heavy feeling. He was supposed to be safe here; he was supposed to have retired from tackling the horrors of the wilds! Is no place in Tamriel secure enough for a man to sit back in his rocking chair, reminisce of his youth, and watch his daughter bloom into the fairest belle in the land?  
  
It appears not.  
  
‘There!’ Jean wheezes, pointing down on the floor. ‘We dragged him inside ‘cause it wasn’t proper, him lying about in the streets like that! What do you think?’.  
  
Horacio frowns and squats down, clutching at his cane for support (good thing he thought to grab it on the way out; otherwise he would not have lasted through the wild race across the village).  
  
Lying before him, is what once was Bastian, a young, rather smug hunter, who provided the game for the village, and (Le gasp!) even bragged about how one day he would venture out and seek his fortune in greater High Rock. Now, however, all that is left of this strong man, in the prime of his health, with not as much as a toothache ailing him, is a greyish husk, unnaturally bloodless and icy-cold to the touch.  
  
‘He didn’t drown, did he?’   
  
There are several other onlookers in the room apart from Jean and the guard, and one of them decides to voice an opinion, gesturing towards the hunter’s face – which does rather resemble that of a drowned corpse, with darkened, bloated lips and sunken eyes with deep circles traced around them, so boldly that one might think that they have been drawn on purpose in dirty-purple paint.  
  
‘I mean, it sort of looks like he drowned… But we found him not far from here, waaay far from any creek or something… If he fell in while he was hunting, how did he get back into the village? And why is he so… dry?’   
  
‘Because he has been drunk dry, my observant friend,’ Horacio remarks with a heavy sigh. ‘You did not think of inspecting his body any closer, did you?’  
  
Everyone assembled shakes their heads in unison, their eyes rounding fearfully.  
  
Horacio nods in understanding and tilts the hunter’s head slightly to the side, brushing back his hair. Just as he suspected: there are two small, pinpoint puncture marks in his neck, right over his jugular… And something else, too.   
  
Cut deep into the dead man’s skin a few inches underneath the puncture points, are three lines, two of them meeting at a sharp upward angle and the third running across them, forming a jagged letter ‘A’.   
  
As Horacio exposes his discovery, the gawking villagers let out a tremendous gulp.  
  
‘What does this meeeeeen?’ the guard drawls shakily, pointing a jittering finger at the markings.  
  
‘I… I am not sure…’ Horacio says as he straightens himself up. ‘Examining the rest of his body might tell me more’.  
  
‘That don’t seem right,’ another villager intervenes, in a gruff, thick voice.  
  
Horacio swerves towards him and pokes the air in front of him meaningfully with his cane.  
  
‘You were the ones who called me here! You have acknowledged my expertise – so you must do exactly as I say! Poor Bastian here might well be the first in a series of victims – and if we don’t find out for sure who did this to him and why, who knows what will happen next!’  
  
The old guard lets out a shrill ‘Yeeep!’ and leaps right into the brawny, hairy arms of the gruff-voiced villager; in the meanwhile, the rest of the onlookers exchange terrified glances and, without any further objections, pick up Bastian and dump his hapless carcass onto the guard’s dinner table, sweeping off some cutlery in the process and scaring the living daylight out of the feeble, grey-faced hound who has been taking a nap on the floor nearby.  
  
Drawing a deep breath and half-closing his eyes for a moment, Horacio rolls up his sleeves and leans over the table. Why, why did it have to come to this? Why his village? Why his neighbours? Why him?..  
  
After Bastian’s clothes have been duly removed, it turns out that there are more letters carved into various parts of his body: three slanting slashes spell out a father lopsided ‘N’ across his pallid chest, while his left and right wrists bear the letters ‘L’ and ‘R’, respectively, cut across the hard, dark wires that were once his veins. There is also an ‘E’ marking his pelvis, with its three parallel lines pointing downwards and the middle one extending rather disturbingly further than the others (at beholding this sight, one of the two women present blushes and buries her face in her hands, while the other succumbs to an uncontrollable sobbing fit and tries to run out of the house, only to be drawn back by Horacio’s orders, for he cannot have her spreading panic too early).   
  
As Horacio pries open Bastian’s mouth, much to the collective disgust of all those watching, he discovers a mangled ‘G’ decorating his greyish-white tongue (at this moment, some of the men have started sobbing too); and after, with Jean’s assistance, the self-appointed examiner turns the body over, it turns out that Bastian has an ‘M’ written on his back and an ‘U’ traced across his heel… And also that, as some sort of inappropriate joke, there is a huge ‘B’ stamped across his buttocks.   
  
‘By the gods!’ Jean, who has begun sweating again, wipes his hands frantically across his face. ‘What is this madness?! Did he do this to himself?!’  
  
‘No, of course not!’ Horacio explains. ‘Look at the cuts – there is no crusted blood over them! They were made after the body was drained – as a message! The…’   
  
He swallows a hard, sharp lump. Gods, he really does not want to say this word in front of these poor, terrified people…  
  
‘The killer left poor Bastian to be found; he wanted us to see the letters – so they must spell out something!’  
  
He wrinkles his forehead and taps his index finger against it.  
  
‘A, N, L, R, E, G, M, U, B… Just have to… shift them around… B, U, G.. Bug-nearlm? Nearly-bug? No, that does not make sense… Man-reg… Glem-ul… Wait a second! G, L, E, N, U, M, B, R, A! Glenumbra!’  
  
‘Glenumbra?’ the old guard echoes. ‘That’s… That’s a place, right? Somewhere… out there?’   
  
He waves his hand vaguely in the general direction of ‘out there’.  
  
‘Yes, it’s definitely a place,’ Horacio confirms. ‘I’ve been to Glenumbra, actually…’  
  
He stops in mid-sentence, his face suddenly growing almost as pale as Bastian’s – while his heart plummets down somewhere in between his toes and sinks through the floor.  
  
‘Gods…’ he mouths, clawing at his chest in a vain search for the runaway organ. ‘When I was in Glenumbra, I cleared out a vampire den! A… a vampire den! The bite marks, the blood loss, the message – it all fits together! Jean…’  
  
He addresses his neighbour, trying and failing to get control over his own voice.  
  
‘Tell me, Jean – how did it occur to you to come to me? Did the thought come of its own accord, or..?’  
  
Jean blinks.  
  
‘Actually…’ he says, breathing heavier than ever before. ‘It… It was very… creepy, when I think about it… We had just stumbled upon Bastian, and there was this flash of greenish light… Back then, I thought it was because I was so scared… And then – then a voice, hammering inside my head… “Get to Horacio before he sits down to dinner! Get to Horacio before he sits down to dinner!” I ran as fast as I could, and the voice ran with me, hammering, again and again, and sort of in tune with my footsteps… I figured it had to be me own voice… but… but…’  
  
‘Green light…’ Horacio repeats, gripping his cane so tight that his knuckles grow white. ‘Illusion magic! My good Jean – this was not your voice! Someone went to great lengths to make sure that you came to me, that I saw the body… I…’  
  
His voice, which has been quivering all this time, now cracks completely.  
  
‘I have to check on my family!’


	5. Chapter 5

As any dedicated adventurer, Remedios has her own map. It is a very meticulous depiction of the village and its vicinity, which she and her Papa have been compiling together for quite some time, tracing the outlines of tiny houses and footpaths in black and red ink, and adding images of stylized little fir trees to mark the edges of the great forest. And when they ran out of factual details to document (because in a small village like theirs, there are only so many places you can put on a map), they started prettifying their creation with various doodles of mythical monsters from Papa’s stories, which they placed in every blank space they could find (some of these critters, with elongated snouts and prominent front teeth, ended up resembling exaggerated caricatures of Aunt Gervaise). They have also added a fancy-looking scroll with ribbon-like, frilly edges that Remedios has shaded in fine cross-hatching lines – a task entrusted to her because Papa’s hand is not as steady as it used to be. The scroll bears the image of a hand in an ornate metal gauntlet, pointing somewhere upwards, and a calligraphic inscription, ‘HERE BE YE OLDE SKYRIM’. Quite a sight, this map of theirs!  
  
And now, of course, Remedios has improved the map even further: she has drawn a little heart in every place where she had nocturnal meetings with her romantically mysterious lover. Of course, because he insisted that their relationship (oh gods, she feels so good saying the word! So adult! So important!) be kept a secret, Remedios has been hiding the map under her pillow, while doing her best to convince Papa that he must have lost it somewhere. Plus, this way, she can keep the map by her side while getting lost in pleasant dreams about the enchanted fairy-tale she is living in; and, when the time comes, she can take it out and smother it with kisses – and then slip it under her clothes, somewhere close to her chest, and run off to whichever heart-marked place where her beloved stands waiting on this particular night.   
  
Only tonight, much to her dismay, she discovers that she has been so impatient to set off on her journey towards the mystic cave that she left the map back in her room. The realization hits her as she is skipping down the path towards the village outskirts, having just passed by her family’s neighbour, a portly, thin-haired man named Jean (the fellow rushed by her without as much as saying ‘Good evening’, apparently too preoccupied by something to notice her… Well, all the better for her right? She is not in any danger of being ratted out to her parents!). As it dawns on her that the map is missing, Remedios slows down, uncertain what to do next. She and her Papa have explored every nook and cranny of the forest, so in theory, she should be able to find her way even without the map, especially if she casts a Magelight spell to keep the shadows from confusing her (just to make sticking to the path easier! For she is not afraid of the dark any more! She is not afraid of anything, since her great, unimaginable, unrivalled love sustains her!). But what if somebody stumbles across her map while she is away? What if they see the hearts, and begin wondering what they could mean, and her super-important secret is revealed?  
  
No. No way.  
  
She grins smugly to herself.  
  
She is just being paranoid, letting stupid thoughts get into her head – like that time when she thought that her beloved’s eyes were glowing! Everyone in the house will sleep peacefully through the night, thanks to the draught she has to skillfully crafted; her map will be safe from prying eyes! She just needs to relax and enjoy what the glorious, glorious night has in store for her – and, for the gods’ sake, stop getting this weird urge to rush back home!  
  
Shaking her head like a young filly chasing off a gnat, Remedios snaps her fingers to make a pulsing orb of blue light float into the air over her shoulder – and, with magic to guide her way, dives into the slumbering forest to find the meeting place, bold and confident and eager.  
  
Remedios’ faith in her own knowledge of the area proves to be well-placed; it does not take her all that long to locate the cave her precious, darling sweetheart spoke of. She thinks her Papa and her passed it by a few times on their treks through the wilds, but never actually stepped inside: she wanted to, of course, spurned on by the insatiable curiosity of youth – but Papa talked her out of it, saying that happy, pretty children belong in sunlit meadows and lush green groves, not dank and smelly caves. Well then, she will now see just how dank and smelly this place is! It was chosen by her one true love, so it has to be a wonderful, romantic place for the meeting of two hearts that belong to one another!  
  
However, just a few steps into the cave’s dark, gaping maw make Remedios tell herself, more than a little reluctantly, that Papa was right. The walls are covered in some oozing slime that glints like tar in the light of her magic orb; and she thinks she can feel some soft, clammy fungi brush against her leg as they sway from side to side on their wobbly stalks. Her shoes get soaked through with moisture almost instantly, and, to her silent dismay, the hem of her best Sundas dress is soon splattered by mud. Shuddering all over, Remedios scolds herself under her breath for being so petty and tries to suppress a feeling of disgust. After all, all the muck and slime does not matter if she is about to bask in heavenly love!  
  
But, seventeen-year-old females will be seventeen-year-old females (yes, she is still rounding it up: now even more than ever, since she is a grown woman!). Remedios is just about to step out of the narrow entrance passageway into a more spacious chamber when she feels something furry scurry over her feet, lashing at her ankles with a long, scaly tail. And, all thoughts abandoned, she lets out a piercing shriek and makes a tremendous leap upwards, almost banging her head against the ceiling.  
  
‘Not so loud, girl. You will draw attention to us before it is time’.  
The voice belongs to her beloved, of course – she would recognize that soothing velvety timbre anywhere. But… But why does it seem so cold, so uncaring… harsh, even? Is he angry at her for some reason? Has she done something to make him unhappy? Is being scared of some cave rat that big a wrongdoing?   
  
Remedios bites into her lower lip, a sickly feeling building up in the pit of her stomach, and stumbles into the cavernous chamber, where, standing in the pale, greenish beam of light that comes through a hole in the ceiling, is a familiar robed figure… which somehow instills the same sense of mounting dread that overcame her when they first met.  
  
‘Uh… Hello,’ she mumbles weakly. ‘I am sorry I squealed like that… I… I hope I did not make you too mad at me…’  
  
‘Well, let us hope you did not alert any meddlesome villagers and proceed as planned,’ her love replies as he steps towards her, his voice growing even icier than before.  
  
Proceed as planned? That’s… an odd choice of words. He has never referred to their kisses or love-making this way before! It sounds just so… formal, and horribly unromantic, and…  
  
Her beloved makes another step to intercept her, his hands behind his back and his eyes fixed on her face…. And – and there is that yellow glimmer again! Remedios clutches at her throat, reeling in a sudden onset of shortness of breath. This feels wrong – very, very wrong; as if, instead of a joyful, carefree dream, she has just walked into a waking nightmare!  
  
For a few moments, the cave is perfectly silent; she has never experienced this kind of silence before, not even in her village’s small graveyard. This silence is sticky, almost tangible, clogging up her ears and mouth and nose as if she is sinking into murky water; she can imagine it trickling down the walls like that slurping black tar… And then - then the man in front of her, the man who has always been so tender and loving and perfect… He laughs.  
  
And that laughter is even worse than the silence. It does not have even the tiniest spark of mirth in it; it is hollow, almost mechanical, and cold, just like his voice.  
  
‘Oh, I am not referring to kisses, sweet thing...’  
  
Wait, did she voice all her musings out loud? She is almost certain she hasn’t – and that would mean… That would mean that he has read her thoughts! Papa says only the most skilled Illusion adepts can do that, and, according to the most adventure-packed of his stories, this level of magic usually comes when you make deals with Daedra! So… So this must mean that this horrible, horrible person is some sort of dark mage, or cultist, that has taken the form of her beloved and is fooling with her mind! Yes, that explains it!   
  
Remedios draws a shaky sigh of relief. Frightening as it might be, finding herself face to face with a Daedra worshipper, it’s so good to know that it is not actually…  
  
‘Oh, it _is_ me, Remedios’.  
  
The tide of her frantic thoughts is stemmed by another harsh remark.   
  
‘There is no second person that took your lover’s place and is trying to hurt you, while the real fairy-tale prince is out there preparing a rescue. There is only one me, and I am trying to hurt you all by myself’.  
  
Remedios’ legs give way, and before the cave can float away from her, she wraps her hands around a nearby stalagmite.   
  
‘What… What do you mean… Hurt me?’ she asks, barely able to speak, as overwhelming nausea makes her throat contract.  
  
The robed man, the lover who suddenly turned into a stranger, looms over her, and in the uneven light of her mage fire, she can finally take a close look at his face. And the sight rips her heart into tiny, bleeding shreds.  
  
The perfect, chiseled features, which she so admired, remain the same – but the outlines of this once-cherished face have grown sharper, more angular, with deeper shadows under the cheekbones and around his eyes, which now are most definitely burning with a cold, undying yellow flame that seems to burn into Remedios’ very soul... And his teeth – oh, Mara Mother of Mercy, his teeth! His upper lip has folded back like that of a snarling hound, exposing his pale gums and a row of long, sharp teeth, with the fangs standing out especially, with droplets of saliva quivering on their tips. Paralyzed, unable to draw away from this twisted, monstrous visage, which reminds her of a wax mask from some horrifying play, Remedios suddenly feels an itch in the two faded spots on her neck… Where he bit her.  
  
 _It was too early, he said. Too early… And now – now it isn’t?_  
  
‘What… What do you want with me? With my family?’ she asks breathlessly, barely able to hear her own voice over the thundering beat of her heart. Only now, it is nothing like the triumphant drumming that resounded within her when she thought she had fallen in love.  
  
He leers at her, the corners of his mouth drawing apart in a way that gives his face an even more feral look.  
  
‘Oh, I want so many things – and you helped me achieve them! I must confess, I was barely able to believe my own luck! Even the lowliest cattle cannot possibly be stupid enough to believe that _bonemeal_ is an ingredient of a sleeping potion!’.  
  
Potion… Oh gods, the potion! Her poor Mama, and Papa, and Grandfather – and Aunt Gervaise, bless her dear disapproving soul! She can’t… She can’t have poisoned them all! No, no, no! This can’t be happening!  
  
With a prolonged groan of pain, Remedios lets go of the stalagmite and slips down to her knees. For a moment, the cave vanishes into nothingness, dissolving into a sweltering haze of rage – at herself, for her own unimaginable, unforgivable foolishness; and at this… monster, which tricked her into falling in love with it and used her to destroy her own family. And in the fire that burns before her eyes, she thinks she can see a blurred shape, spreading out a pair of enormous, webbed wings. Mirroring the vision’s motion, Remedios spreads out her own shoulders and lets a loud, roaring cry rip through her chest.   
  
This cry, like a rallying call in some powerful, long-forgotten language, lifts her up to her feet, making her lunge at the beast before her, each of her hands gloved into tongues of flame. But this desperate surge of strength lasts only for a few moments; in the blink of an eye, the haze is gone, and the burning vision with it. The fanged monster dodges her grasp, making her lose balance and drop to the cave’s floor again, her fire spell extinguished and skin peeling painfully off her palms and knees. The creature seizes the moment and, sweeping down, closes its grasp around her throat and lifts her up into the air with such is as though she were a newborn infant.  
  
‘An impressive display of Destruction magic, right there,’ it hisses silkily, its lips almost touching hers, as though it is about to kiss her (and the recollection of all the previous kisses they shared makes dense tears well up in Remedios’ eyes, each sob echoing painfully inside her heart).  
  
‘Your father has taught you well… Pitting you two against one another will be an even finer spectacle than I expected!’  
  
A long, narrow tongue flicks ravenously against the bared teeth; an impatient, huffing breath scorches Remedios’ skin; and then, at long last, after so much waiting and plotting and beguiling, two fangs sink deep into the soft, warm flesh of her neck.   
  
The world is shattered by poignant, crushing pain – and in its stead, comes empty blackness.


	6. Chapter 6

Keeping up my disguise as the mysterious young lover has been quite a challenge; the hunter’s life force could never have sustained me indefinitely, and occasional nibbles at wilderness creatures, like the one that the foolish mortal almost tripped over just recently, have obviously not been enough (not to mention that hunting for skeevers, like some sort of marginalized slum dweller that subsists on garbage heaps, is an unbearably disgusting practice). Many times before now, I have felt as though my saccharine visage was about to melt away, unmasking the true face of my burning hunger – the hunger that has been gnawing at me from within, making me restless, feverish almost, at times muddling my thoughts and flooding my mind with one persistent image: a steady, generous flow of the precious, invigorating drink, warm and tangy and gleaming with every enticing shade of ruby.  
  
It was this hunger that made me lose control, for a moment – a single, fleeting moment that could have irrevocably ruined my plans! – and sink my teeth into the girl’s neck while she was so blindly, so foolishly, so laughably giving herself to me. And it is this hunger that is driving me now, as I whisk her up from the floor and then, after holding her in my grasp for a short while, watching her kick and writhe in pain, press her against the wall, grinding myself against her with a far greater, far more passionate force than when I was playing along with her lust. The pulsing, steaming jet of her blood is pouring into me, and as I get a better, more prolonged taste of her living warmth, the ravenous force within me ever swells, building up, burning, never ceasing to yearn for more and more and more. I feel that at any moment now, I will throw back my head, the inebriating red drink smeared across my lips, and erupt into a wild, ecstatic scream, not unlike the scream that she let out when _I_ poured myself into _her_.   
  
But yet again, I stop myself. Self-discipline. Self-discipline above all. I do not need her to repeat the fate of that male mortal, whom I had so much fun covering with warning signals, addressed to my enemy. I need to consume just enough of her blood to make her bound to my will: an obedient thrall that will rise up against her father in an ultimate dramatic duel, the crowning final act of the entertainment show that I have devised for myself.  
  
If she proves a gifted performer, I might even consider passing on my gift – after all, I have been wandering the wilderness all by myself for far too long. If my enemy found contentment in settling down and starting a family, what makes me worse than him? Or less worthy of happiness? And there could hardly be a better way of dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s in the story of my revenge than to make my new clan’s first fledgling out of the spawn of the very man who sought to destroy my kin! What poetic justice! What a reassurance that my legacy lives on while his crumbles into dust!.. Besides, for all her blundering stupidity, the mortal child might prove a delightful companion in bed; provided she has sufficient training in pleasuring a man such as myself… and clothed in proper attire, naturally.   
  
The girl has stopped thrashing by now; as I finally order myself to tear away from her refreshing wellspring of a jugular, pressing my lips together and steadying my posture, her head droops listlessly to her chest, and she sags heavily into my arms. I catch her before she can thud down (can’t have her cracking her skull against the stone, now can I? She still has to go on-stage for me!) and lay her onto the cavern bed. Then, before drawing away, I pass my fingertip against the corner of my mouth, which is still moist with the delectable red liquid, and dab softly at her lips.   
  
Now, perfectly still and ashen-pale after my feast, with her mouth shaded a rich, dark crimson, she looks almost presentable. I narrow my eyes and tilt my head, picturing her in a lavish red-and-black gown, with a bodice so open that one can almost catch a glimpse of the brownish-pink, teasing outline of her nipples; and with all this tangled mahogany hair brushed back, naturally – or perhaps even styled into a short haircut, exposing her white, slender neck, with two bite marks forever reminding of my bond with her. I picture her eyes glowing with the same golden fire that awoke in the gaze of myself and my blood siblings when I was turned; and imagine how delightful her smile will look, her fangs barely peeking out, as she sails through the candle-lit hall of some abandoned fort or castle, greeting every member of our clan, encouraging the newest arrivals, inquiring whether the cattle pens are well-supplied…   
  
Come now. Self-discipline. I was getting carried away again. For one thing, it would be terribly embarrassing if I ended up growing overly attached to this blabbering, besotted mortal – and for another, I cannot dally here any longer! I have the whole evening planned out, and the next item on the agenda requires me to leave the cave, and as soon as possible! I might have missed some of the excitement already.  
  
Making a point of not giving the mortal’s limp, drained form another look, I straighten myself up and turn towards my makeshift lair’s mouth. All it takes is a little concentration – and soon, the cave fills with the flutter of many dark, webbed wings. The summoned bats cloak me in an ever-shifting, squeaking cloud and lift me off the ground, ready to carry me towards the village.  
  
As they sweep through the forest, and then through the darkened streets, I think I can spot a couple of horror-struck peasants pointing at my winged escort, their eyes bulging like raw egg whites and their hair standing on end. A hilarious sight, for sure! Albeit prone to result in an angry mob shoving torches and pitchforks into my face… Especially now that they have discovered my little… fleshy message. But I am fairly certain that their pitchfork-wielding fervour will be short-lived: there is only one remotely competent fighter in this chicken coop, and I will be finished with him before sunrise.  
  
Speaking of which – here is the little cottage from which my clueless little lover girl has sneaked off to meet me so many times! And – and I believe there is a human figure, limping towards it, trying and failing to walk faster… My old, old enemy. I can almost hear the thoughts rattling through his balding old skull: how he must curse his own age, and his failing leg… How he must pray to all the gods he can think of, begging them to keep his kin alive, at least until he gets home!..  
  
Barely able to contain a burst of triumphant laughter, I land softly on the ground and dismiss the bats with a habitual, almost mechanical, flick of my wrist. Then, with just as much practiced ease, I hide myself beneath the pall of an Invisibility spell – and, making sure to keep a reasonable distance between myself and my quarry, proceed inside through the front door, which, quite naturally, the girl forgot to shut after herself. It must have swinging back and forth on its hinges ever since the younger mortal left, pushed by the touched of the nocturnal wind and making prolonged, mournful creaking noises, as though lamenting the sight my enemy is about to discover inside. And by Lord Bal, the look on the man’s face when the creaking gets particularly loud! He whirls on his heels, panting, startled out of his wits, and then clasps his cane-free wrist tightly and smacks himself on the head – perhaps scolding himself for being so easily scared? Then, he clams his breath with a huge huff of air and marches into the house.  
  
I follow him, unseen, delighting in the dead stillness of every room and in the way the wind blows through this lifeless wooden carcass (because the child’s father did not think to shut the door either!). And, oh, one must not forget those ghostly strips of moonlight, slanting across the floor – and the clots of purest, inky blackness swelling up in each corner, taking on a curious, bizarre new shape with every next moment! Sometimes, they look frightening, making my prey sweat and quiver from head to toe, and mutter angrily under his breath,  
  
‘Come on, Horacio, keep your wits about you! Stop, _stop_ being so bloody jumpy!’  
  
And sometimes, they incite false hope. It takes me a lot of composure not to betray my presence by hissing in glee when my quarry reaches out towards some rippling shade, resembling the figure of a woman in a long dress looking out of the window, and wheezes frantically,  
  
‘Annette? Is that you? Tell me, are you all right? Where is everyone? Where is Meme?’…  
  
And then – ha! – the light changes, and it turns out to be just a fluttering curtain! Oh, simply priceless!  
  
Eventually, the terrified little mortal staggers into the kitchen – and this is where the fun truly begins.  
  
The flames in the fireplace are dying, and the reddish glow of the embers grotesquely highlights the features of the party at the table, giving them a wonderfully ghoulish look. I feel something akin to the joy of an artist admiring his own handiwork when I look over each of the mortals – still in their chairs, still with spoons clasped in their hands, but remaining motionless; not heeding my enemy’s hoarse, desperate cries as he calls out to each of them in turn; not moving; not breathing.  
  
Slowly, cautiously, taking care not to bump to my prey, as he is beginning to act irrationally, dashing from one corner of the room to another like a captured beast, I take a closer look at the oldest member of the droll, wax-like little family. The withered centenarian is sitting with his toothless mouth open, dried-up froth sticking to his skin like white, flaky clay. A little spider has descended from the ceiling of its wispy web and is now stretching a fine, silvery thread over the high bridge of the man’s nose. For a moment, I get distracted again, painting an immensely amusing mental picture of him as a skeleton, all dressed into cobwebs like into soft, grey finery, a mother spider tending to her hatchlings in the shelter of his empty socket… This chain of thought makes me reel with noiseless laughter – but the show is not nearly finished.  
  
As my enemy stumbles among his family members, prodding and poking them, and lifting up their cold, ragdoll-like hands, and looking pleadingly into the indifferent masks that were once their faces, I catch a whiff of his jumbled thoughts, which sink into his mind like an assortment of barbed thorns, each one cutting deeper than the rest. At first glance, they might seem like random, unrelated images – but I have been through the same torment, and I can understand perfectly well how this mixed-up jigsaw puzzle can make someone sway from side to side, clutching his head in agony. Finally, the man who destroyed my coven is feeling the way I felt.  
  
As he leans over the future spider-infested carcass of his father-in-law, I see drowsy evenings, as the setting sun makes the village bask in dazzling shades of gold and rich green; and I see two men rocking side by side in their cozy wicker chairs, the younger one spinning a long-winded yarn about some elaborate pirate heist that he took part in, and the older shaking his head in disbelief and slight disapproval – but not unkindly. I see flashes of bright orange, as the elderly peasant stands in front of an enormous pumpkin, his hands resting on the shovel handle, and looks at the mud-splattered vegetable with glowing pride, while his son-in-law chuckles at him in friendly mockery. I see my enemy wrapped in a blanket on a dreary winter night, his nose red and swollen and oozing, glaring at the world around him with weary hostility, with the older man standing in front of him, gnarled finger raised into the air, and soliloquizing about how even adventurers can catch cold and how a nice mixture of dried herbs is better than any ‘fancy healing magic’.  
  
Finally, my prey draws back, and steps towards his wife. Oh, here things get even more entertaining; I regret not catching a mouse or a handful of small birds to nibble on while I am watching.   
  
He cups his hands around her soft cheeks, shaded sickly-white instead of a tender shade of rose, and presses his forehead against hers, his shoulders twitching. The flashes of memories get brighter, more intense; there is just so much here…   
  
Furtive kisses in the barn, away from the prying eyes of her prudish older sister, with their heads swimming with the smell of hay and the warm, wet touch of each other’s tongues. The summer heat of their wedding night, when he, all of a sudden, begins sobbing into her creamy bosom, overwhelmed by the feeling of finally having a family, and a beautiful woman to call his wife. Mornings in the kitchen, when everything outside is wrapped into the soft blanket of snow, and the household relishes the opportunity to sleep in, with no harvest to gather – all the household, except her, because she cannot wait to cook up that hearty meal she promised…  
  
I can sense the deep, dull pain that eats at him when he remembers the way he watched her, leaning against the back of his chair, his eyes still half-glued with sleep, as her full pink elbows moved in a steady rhythm through of cloud of flour dust – and realizes that none of this will ever happen again. No more watching her in the kitchen, and surprising her with a tackle hug as she is just about to put the filling in the pie. No more helping her out with chores, his heart singing every time she glances at him in encouragement, as though saying, ‘Well, what do you know: adventurers can cut the grass for the goats just like the rest of us!’. No more arguing over his long forays into the wilds with their daughter, which always end with his wife frowning and folding her arms on her chest to show what she thinks of all this foolishness, and him apologizing and promising that he will not let the girl come to harm. Oh yes, Horacio Saavedra, let the though sink in – let it eat through your chest the exact way a similar thought once ate through mine! Your wife will never, ever greet you, smile at you, kiss you; she is nothing but an empty shell now, home for worms and bugs and spiders! All those moments that your memory keeps flaunting in front of your eyes – they will never repeat; they will slip away into oblivion, rushing away from you like sand trickling through your numb, useless fingers! Fingers that will certainly not bring your darling Annette back to life, no matter how hard you wave them before her face, casting a healing spell again and again to no avail!  
  
It takes him long, very long to stop trying to revive his wife – but he finally leaves her be, and switches his attention to her sister. In life, this particular mortal specimen has been exceedingly unpleasant; stubborn, self-centered, domineering, always bent on having things her own way, never acknowledging that other people in Tamriel might actually be right about something… But even she was bound to have her rare moments of softness and compassion – and, of course, _now_ is just the time for her wretched brother-in-law to remember these moments, and to realize how much he is going to miss her. I know – there were some in my coven that did not incite any warm feelings within me; but as I saw them crumble to dust, my poor, dazed mind focused only on those rare times when they were friendly.  
  
But… By the Daedra, do my senses deceive me? No, I am certain of it: there is still a pulse of life within the old woman; her heart, even though it is gripped by suffocating cold, obstinately continues to pump blood through her body!.. If my enemy realizes this, he will be certain to revive her with his magic, and mar my triumph over him!  
  
My thoughts race madly as I await my prey’s next move. What will he do? What will _I_ do? Should I step out of the shadows, lunge at the woman, making sure that the thread of her life is cut here and now? Or should I continue watching from the shadows until her heart grows dark and cold like the dying embers – even though my protective spell might wear off at any moment?  
  
No. Forget the old woman. I have still dealt my enemy a blow by making his daughter snuff out the life of her mother and grandfather – and I really must return to her! She needs to be awakened as my thrall, and instructed to seek out her father and cut him down! The grumpy aunt is but a tiny cog in my scheme, and it matters little that she did not die when she was supposed to; I shall deal with her later. After the curtain falls.


	7. Chapter 7

Oh dear gods, this has rendered him more helpless than he ever remembers feeling… He has really underestimated how soft this settled, cozy life has made him.   
  
As an adventurer, he looked into the face of death almost on a daily basis; and when it looked back at him, it wasn’t always pretty. Sure, he tried to save as many innocent people as he could, from pillaging marauders or overly mischievous imps or crazed mages or whatever else they were running from at that particular moment; but not everyone came out alive: no matter how he tied himself into knots to keep them safe, some people insisted on flinging themselves into the middle of the fray, waving tiny knives at the slobbering maw of some mythic beastie like it would change anything. Quite naturally, some of them were bound to get ground into dust – but Horacio tended to walk away the moment he received his reward for saving the day, not allowing himself to dwell too much on what might have happened if that poor fool just stayed put, and what his or her family members were going to do now… Accidents happen. Collateral damage. Time to move on. That sort of thing.   
  
In his youth, he had no strong attachments, no lasting sorrows and regrets, and if one of those strangers he came across happened to be claimed by the gods, or the Daedra, or whatever, he just shrugged if off, maybe shed a few tears, and then bounced along on his merry way. But this time – this time things are different. He is no longer a carefree tumbleweed – he has firmly planted himself into this quaint little community, started a family… And now it feels like someone grabbed a huge, sharp axe and took a huge whack right at his roots.  
  
And with the roots bleeding and cracking, he feels dazed, as though stumbling through a fog. Like a mechanical construct that still patrols the halls of a Dwemer ruin even though its masters are long since gone, he keeps circling around the table, going from Etienne to Annette to Gervaise, and then, again to Annette, his darling, darling Annette – and casts a healing spell that goes out with no effect, hissing like a firecracker thrown into a puddle of water. His head is pounding with old, happy memories – which all seem so bright, almost dazzling, compared to the muddy murk in the kitchen, and the ghastly shadows gathering around the eyes and cheekbones of the solemn, silent trio that is gathered around the table, remaining deaf and blind and petrified despite all his efforts to make them respond to him.   
  
A tiny part of him still hopes, in a piteous, childish way, that all of this might, just might prove to be some sort of horrible dream, and eventually, he will wake up, and those happy moments will repeat, and there will be many, many more sunsets on the porch and winter mornings in the warm, fragrant kitchen, and friendly smiles that he has grown to cherish so much. But no; with every next staggering circle around the table, with every next look into the dim, glazed eyes of his father-in-law, with every next pained, sob-like kiss planted on the back of his wife’s icy cold hand – the realization of the truth sinks in deeper and deeper, and the suffocating, throbbing feeling grips his innards tighter and tighter till he thinks he is going to retch.  
  
They are dead. Mara’s mercy, they are really dead. And it is all his fault.  
  
Who would have thought, who would have predicted, that this one little escapade, this one adventure in Glenumbra would turn out to be so fateful… He has never even given it much thought until now.  
  
There have been so many similar quests that were given to him, in different corners of High Rock and other provinces – so many vampire lairs that had to be cleansed before the foul beings infected any more victims with their tainted bite. All his fanged-critter-slaying raids sort of blended into one, and sometimes, when sharing his reminiscences with his family, he ended up confusing details or retelling old stories in several contradicting versions because there were some things that he forgot… The fool. The bloody fool!   
  
He should have double-checked that cave, before setting the vampire’s quivering would-be dinner free and sauntering off, as smug as a peacock on a goddamn dung heap! He should have made sure that every single monster in it had been dealt with! That there were suspicious shadows slinking off while he was too busy grinning at the half-exposed breasts of the Nord woman that he was untying.  
  
Oh, back then he thought he was so smart, so brave, so heroic! Some vampire hunter he made – letting one of those twisted creatures slip away! And now the cursed Daedra spawn is back, carving up an unfortunate village boy after sucking all blood out of him, and then sending poor Jean to him, Horacio, to make sure he sees it all, and comes home to find a pile of corpses greeting him instead of his family! Oh gods, he can’t even begin to think what the monster did to his poor Meme! The sweet, innocent child, not even seventeen yet! He is too afraid to leave the kitchen and search the rest of the house, lest he… lest he find his little girl sprawled on the floor somewhere, with her heart ripped out of her chest as another ‘message’! He… he can’t…  
  
Wait, what was that? Without even realizing what he was doing, Horacio has taken his sister-in-law’s hand in his – and now it is slowly dawning on him that he can feel a faint pulse against his fingertips, like a timid knock on the door, slow and cautious, as though old Gervaise is not quite sure whether to stay or move on.  
  
A broad, almost insane smile splits across Horacio’s face, and he lets out a shaky gasp of relief. Arkay’s beard, he never thought he’d be so happy to learn that his sister-in-law is (sort of) alive and kicking (well not, as much kicking as sitting slumped in her chair, but damn if this isn’t good news!) Oh, bless that crusty old crone! He knew there was too much bile brewing in her – quite a wonderful resistance against whatever that vampire came up with! Now, he must give that spell an extra effort! He is not the world’s best healer: he could not even fix his own broken leg – but he will have to try. The trick is to sustain the biddy long enough for him to pop into the lab and brew a proper restorative potion!  
  
Biting into his lips in concentration, Horacio rests his cane against the table’s side, flexes the fingers of both his hands, and flares up the tingling reddish-gold glow anew. And this time, it is not a futile attempt to fix something that, deep down, he knows is beyond repair. Oh no, by the Void, it isn’t! Now he is giving it his best shot, bent on saving at least one member of his family. As though drawing power from his determination, the spell flashes brightly, dispelling the dreary darkness of the kitchen for a fraction of a moment, and then flows in a rippling stream into the old woman’s wide (rather hairy) nostrils, and into her half-open mouth, and underneath her drooping eyelids, filling her whole like good honeyed mead fills a flask. Horacio steps back and watches his own magic in action with baited breath, like a boy that sees a single spark shoot up into the sky, leaving a smoky trail behind it, and eagerly waits for it to erupt into stunning fireworks.   
  
No literal fireworks come, of course – but some of Gervaise’s greyish, unnatural pallor does recede; she jerks convulsively in her chair, a little bit like a dead frog that has been stung by a bolt of shock magic, and then throws her eyes wide open.  
  
Horacio is just about to clap his hands and dance for joy (as best he can with his bad leg) – but before he can as much as move an inch, his sister-in-law pins him to one spot with a very intent, disapproving glare. Yes, Gervaise is back all right.  
  
‘You can chide me later,’ the man says, somewhat sheepishly. ‘Now, stay put and let me make a nice potion for you! I’ll be back in a jiffy!’  
  
The old woman makes an odd, gurgling sound – and suddenly, leans forward and, her mouth forming a contorted, 8-like shape, expels a dense jet of yellowish-white, sour-smelling liquid right into the bowl of soup in front of her.  
  
Striving to suppress an involuntary chuckle at how crudely humorous the situation is, Horacio limps closer to Gervaise and puts his hands on her shoulders, helping her bend down.  
  
‘So, it looks like you were poisoned, old girl, huh?’ he mutters, as Gervaise wheezes out another portion of her stomach’s contents. ‘That’s it, keep working! Get that muck out of you!’  
  
After a while, helped along by more of Horacio’s healing spells, the old woman finally stops vomiting and leans back wearily in her chair, curling her lips in disgust and motioning weakly at the table. Horacio understands her gesture and, with a shrill screech against the floorboards, turns the chair around so that the old woman faces away from the mess she’s made. As he does so, he catches a glimpse of Annette’s frozen features, and his heart contracts at the thought of how disrespectful this spectacle (and his initial reaction to it) was to her and Etienne. Mouthing ‘I’m sorry, love’ and averting his eyes, he bends down to wipe Gervaise’s lips – and is more than startled when his sister-in-low gathers up as much liquid as is still left in her mouth, and spits into his face.  
  
After a few moments of staring at her, aghast, it occurs to Horacio that he might actually understand what the old woman must have meant; and he says, his voice quiet and grave,  
  
‘I know… I know I failed you. All of you. After all these years of bliss that you shared with me… I could not save your father, or your sister… But, if it’s any consolation, I did save you – and though I dread the likelihood of her being gone, too, there might be a slim chance that Meme…’  
  
Gervaise huffs loudly through her nostrils. Her lips twitch and, with quite a bit of strain, shape themselves into a string of words that, once deciphered, makes Horacio’s heart jolt again,  
  
‘Your… your spawn… She did this…. The… soup… She put… something in… it… Said… she said… Herbs… But… it wasn’t…’  
  
‘No!’ Horacio blurts out, groping around for his cane as his bad leg suddenly feels even less capable of supporting him than usual. ‘No! She can’t have! Meme would never, ever do something like this – to her own family! No, I know who poisoned you! And from what I’ve seen of how this creature’s sick little mind works, it definitely saved up something especially cruel for my little girl! So now I’ll go and make you a poison cure, and put you back on your feet, and we will have a nice chat about what you remember! Any detail might prove crucial to stopping this deranged monster! We might even save Meme yet!’  
  
‘No… She did this…’ Gervaise insists, through fits of dry, barking cough. ‘She… is… sick… deranged… monster…’  
  
But her brother-in-law refuses to listen to her any longer; finally grabbing hold of his cane, he ambles off as fast as he can towards the lab.   
  
He finds the door wide ajar, Meme’s key still sticking out of the lock. This makes his sway slightly, overpowered by a new onset of that unsettling feeling that first gripped him when he entered the house. One glance around the laboratory only makes the feeling stronger. The shelves with alchemy reagents are in complete disarray, and he notices splatters of some oozing substance, smeared all over the walls and especially the experiment table. A pretty common sight after one of his daughter’s potion-brewing sessions. The child never remembers to clean up after herself.  
  
Normally, the untidy state of the lab would have made Horacio smile and shake his head condescendingly – but under these particular circumstances, it sends an invisible blade, read-hot and painfully blunt, right through his gut. Vampires are creatures of stealth; if the monster had taken the key from Meme by force in order to use the laboratory for its nefarious plans, it would have been far more discreet about it. So this has to mean that the girl used the alchemy station all by herself before joining them for supper... And now that he remembers it, Gervaise did shuffle off after her, impatient as always, and kept muttering something about ‘stupid experiments’ when she brought her back. Could what she said to him be true? Could Meme be the culprit behind the poisoning? But – but why?  
  
Focus, Horacio. Focus, and keep investigating.  
  
As he comes closer to the experiment table, he accidentally knocks his elbow against one of the ingredient bowls – and sneezes loudly, his nose getting clogged up with dry, greyish dust. Wait, is that bonemeal? That’s a chief ingredient for most poisons! So Meme… really was… She really did… His innocent child, his little cherry blossom actually concocted a poison that killed her mother and grandfather and nearly finished off her aunt! Does this mean she sided with the monster? That she is backing its plot to destroy her own family? Or… Or maybe… Maybe there has never been a monster – maybe it was Meme who killed Bastian and carved those bite marks and letters into his body, to put her clueless old father off the trail? Like those killers you hear about in the darkest tales – the ones that wear the mask of a harmless little lamb to conceal the leering jaws of a bloodthirsty wolf?..  
  
Maybe Gervaise has been right about him all along, and he has brought bad blood into the family… He has spawned a sadistic maniac… Gods, what sort of nonsense is he thinking?!  
  
Pressing his fingers against his scorchingly feverish forehead, Horacio tries to chase away the insane image of his sweet little baby transforming into a stranger with cold eyes and a cruel, almost inhuman smile. And as he casts his eyes down, he notices a slip of weathered parchment fluttering against his feet, most likely swept out of some corner by the draft. A map - _the_ map; the one that he and Meme made for themselves while they were playing adventurers. Gods, he hasn’t seen the thing in ages; his daughter kept telling him that it had gotten lost! But look – there it is! But there seems to be something different about it… Some markings that he does not remember adding…  
  
Are… Are those… hearts?


	8. Chapter 8

Up until now, Thrall slept.  
  
At first, everything was hot – so hot that there was no air to breath with, and instead of air, everything was filled with needles, running deep into Thrall’s skin, and with barbed, evil plant stalks that kept choking Thrall, dragging her into a huge, frightening place that was filled with nothingness as far as Thrall could see. Thrall was very, very scared of that nothingness, and fought to push it back, and writhed and screamed and kicked and spat with all her might.  
  
But then, it became cold and dark, and the plants drew away and did not choke Thrall any more. And the nothingness leapt forward like a huge, hungry fish, and swallowed Thrall whole. And Thrall realized that she had been foolish to fight back, that the nothingness was actually very nice, like a black, cozy blanket.  
  
And Thrall slept.  
  
And she dreamed a dream. The dream was strange, and out of place, and felt like a splinter in the back of her hand.   
  
Thrall dreamed about a little girl. A tiny, fragile child with a head that seemed too big for her body because of all the matted red hair that curled on its top like a wooly hat. She was naked, and her pale-white body and thin limbs were all covered with freckles; her skin seemed to glow on its own, because all around her, there was nothing but blackness – and yet, Thrall could see her in her mind, clear as day, lying curled up with her knees pressed under her chin.   
  
The girl was crying, on and on and on, without stopping; her tears flowed down her cheeks and then into the blackness that surrounded her, and their tiny, thread-like streams were like cracks in the inky mass, reaching further and further from the girl and closer and closer to Thrall, till they spread so far out that Thrall could have touched them if she just lifted her hand.   
  
But she did not. Why would she? The dream did not make any sense, and made Thrall feel lost and discomforted. The girl seemed vaguely familiar, like she had met her before, some time earlier in her life. But that would have been impossible: Thrall had not had any life before she went to sleep.  
  
And now, she is finally waking up. She is so relieved! The dream is over now, the strange crying girl is gone, and Thrall can start her life!  
  
She opens her eyes, overjoyed, and sees her Master. Oh, Master is so powerful, so mighty, so glorious! Praise be to him! If it were not for him, Thrall would have slept forever, being forced to stare at that weeping girl till the end of time. But Master has wakened her, and now she will obey each one of his commands!  
  
And he has already started giving his orders, her generous Master! He motions her to stand up, and she stands up. He motions her to bow to him, and she bows, as deep as she can, bound to his will for as long as her life shall last. He smiles, and motions her to bare her breasts, and she obeys, not a hint of a blush tinting her cheeks. For she is Thrall, a reflection of her Master’s mind, a faithful servant brought by him into this world – and as he feels no shame, neither shall she.  
  
He comes closer, still smiling, and pinches her nipple between his fingers, passing his tongue over his lips as he does so. She does not flinch, remaining perfectly still and looking straight into her Master’s face, calm and collected and awaiting his next command.  
  
She was in pain when her dream began, but as it ended, so did her capacity to feel hurt. A metal ingot does not cry out when a blacksmith strikes at it; nor does she cry out when her Master traces his nail against her chest, leaving a long, bleeding scratch mark. For she is Thrall. She is an ingot that her mighty Master can shape into a weapon of any kind. And like a weapon, she will strike down anyone that he names, with just as little hesitation as when she exposed herself for him; with no shame, or hurt, or remorse.  
  
Master nods in satisfaction and, after commanding his devoted Thrall to cover her chest, begins preparations for battle. He rests his hand on Thrall’s forehead, with green, glowing threads of magic twisting around his fingers, and makes her open her mind to him – or rather, opens her mind himself, with a key that belongs to him and him alone. For it is his. All his.  
  
And when her mind is open, Master fills it with an image of the Enemy. Of the man she must seek out and destroy in his name.   
  
The Enemy is a short, stocky human, with a broad sun-burnt face, a square jaw, and a large nose that is slightly bent to the side and is covered in a thick layer of freckles. His hair is balding in patches, and glints with two colours: silvery-white, and deep red, like the hair of the girl in Thrall’s dream. She feels that the two of them have to be connected, somehow – no wonder she disliked that girl the moment she saw her!  
  
Thrall stares at the Enemy long and hard, and studies him, and lets bitter hatred fill her heart, making it burn like an enormous, stone-hard piece of coal. The burning feeling spreads through her veins and bones until it bursts through the skin of her palms, shaping itself into two throbbing balls of fire. Thrall has magic, lots of magic, to bring down upon the Enemy; she feels like she had it before, in her sleep – but it was weak, very weak, not enough to hurt anyone, even that ghostly girl with her cracking tears. Now, Master has made her strong. He has made her unstoppable.   
  
With the image of the Enemy branded deep into her mind, Thrall cranes her neck forward slightly and marches out of her Master’s cave, her fists clutched tight in the heart of two flame bolts. Master follows in her wake; she cannot see him, but she can feel him. She can always feel him. For she is Thrall, and her Master shall forever be part of her.   
  
They meet the Enemy soon enough; he is standing in the middle of a forest path, one hand clutching his cane and another grasped round a magical sword that is woven out of silken bands of purplish light. As they find him with his back against the pale light of the moons, he looks like a black, blurred shadow at first. But Thrall knows it is him; she does not wait for him to draw close, and flings a fire spell at him, leering in glee, for she has pleased her Master.  
  
But the Enemy is cunning; before the flaming orb can slam into his face and melt off his skin till it turns into a sagging, colourless, wrinkled mask (like Thrall is already picturing it, her mind mirroring the joyful anticipation of her Master), he puts out the glow of his sword, and casts a protective ward instead. The fire ball bounces off this see-through wall, and goes out. This reminds Thrall of something, but she does not know what – nor does she intend to waste her time trying to figure it out. When someone’s throat is slit, and blood comes spurting out in an arched jet, the weapon that made the blow does not pause and wonder what this red stream looks like. And she will not wonder either – for she is Thrall. Her Master’s newly forged weapon.  
  
The ward stops the destructive orb from hitting the Enemy – but the impact also makes it fade away, leaving behind a weak ripple, as though, for a fleeting moment, the air turns to water. Thrall knows that this opportunity must be used – and she uses it, for she shall not disappoint her Master. There is another orb cradled in her off hand, waiting to be released. She sets it loose, glaring at the Enemy, who seems to be saying something: his lips are moving, and his mouth is twisting into the most piteous shapes; his eyebrows, too, are raised, forming a sharp arch. He must be… pleading with her, perhaps? But she cannot make anything out; her Master has not granted her the ability to hear the Enemy – and thus she knows that whatever he is trying to scream at her, his widened eyes growing moist and red and his chest rising and falling rapidly, it is of no importance.  
  
Of no importance at all.  
  
Thrall’s second orb does not miss, for there is no ward to shatter it, and the Enemy is too busy sobbing to cast a new one. The flame tongues, hungry for flesh, wrap themselves around his arm and shoulder, eating through his clothing and leaving a trail of angry, glistening blisters as they travel further along his body.   
  
The cane, no longer able to support him, slips out of his grasp, and he kneels down heavily; his mouth is now opened wider than ever, contorted by pain. And then, her Master, her kind, thoughtful Master, grants her a wonderful boon: again, she cannot see him, but she senses his magic affecting her from afar. The pall of silence is lifted: the wonderful Master wants to reward his faithful Thrall by letting her hear the Enemy’s screams.  
  
The sound fuels the rage within her, letting it soar to new, unimaginable heights – allowing her to share her Master’s joy. And, spurred on by the shrill song of the Enemy’s pain, she casts her spell again and again, so that now, instead of kneeling, the man lowers himself into the grass completely, face down, hands clawing at the ground, and limbs twitching weakly. She knows that her Master is pleased – but he orders her to slow down, for the agony must be prolonged.  
  
Obeying his will, Thrall allows the fire to simmer down – and then, the screams stop. And in their stead, comes something else. A voice, quiet and faltering, speaking words that have no meaning to her – and yet, for some reason, ring powerfully inside her heart.  
  
 _‘It’s okay, my cherry blossom… It’s okay… I know that you did not… mean it… You did not… mean… to… poison… the soup… either… Your aunt… was very… vo… vocal… when I… healed… her… with… with a spell… and po… potion… And I… almost… believed her… But now…. I see… You can’t help it… You are under… control… You are not… the… monster…_  
  
Thrall is confused. Thrall does not understand. But the little girl does.  
  
She is back again. Crying inside Thrall’s mind. Blocking out any orders that may come from Master. But she is not lying now; she is standing, and looking straight into Thrall’s heart and soul, and moving her lips just like the Enemy did. Trying to tell her something. Trying to show her something.  
  
She tries to chase her off, to make her go away – she wants to hear her Master, not the stupid crying girl! But the little thing is persistent; she moves closer, tears streaming down her face and glowing cracks growing broader and broader under her feet; she talks, and gestures, stubbornly attempting to make Thrall see…  
  
And at last, she sees. She understands. She understands why she kept thinking of all these strange things while she looked at the world around her. They were all connected to the weeping child and the Enemy. The girl and her Papa.  
  
The barbed tendrils that strangled her before she was swallowed up by sleep – she thought of them because she remembered the girl and her Papa clearing out weeds in the back garden. She hacked and slashed at them with triumphant cries, pretending that they were giant serpents – and he watched, chuckling, and gently urged her to tuck her shirt back in when it rolled up too high and bared her tummy.  
  
The hungry fish that the nothingness around her reminded her of – the girl and her Papa caught that fish in the river during a family picnic, and it trashed in their hands till it slipped free, and soared through the air, and slapped the stiffly dignified aunt right across the face!  
  
The blanket of darkness that wrapped around her before Master came and woke her up – it was like the blanket that Papa covered the little girl with every night, after she began dozing in the middle of a bedtime story, trying and failing to unstuck her drooping eyelids, in order to show him that she was not sleepy, na-uh, and wanted to hear more about the goblins, please!  
  
The weapons she compared herself to when Master tested her obedience – the little girl imagined them being forged in the village smithy, instead of boring old scythes and nails. Carried away by her daydreams, she got too close to the fire – and Papa had to pull her back before she got hurt, and almost smacked her on the back of the head for being so reckless… but instead, ended up embracing her, because that what he always did when she made him worry.  
  
And the ribbons of light that twisted together to form the Enemy’s bound sword – they resembled the bands of silk that Papa wove into the girl’s unruly hair, while she pouted and fidgeted on the spot and winced when he pulled at the hair too tight; but he soothed her by telling her to imagine how pleased Mama would be to see her little Meme all pretty and dressed up from Granddaddy’s birthday, and she consented and decided that this time, she was not going to be _too_ cross with them all…  
  
All of this seems to mean a lot to the naked little girl; she clasps her hands against her narrow chest, and keeps weeping, and her tears trickle down to her feet, feeding the angry cracks. Thrall closes her eyes and does what the girl wanted her to do all alone. She touches one of the cracks – and, in a flash, it expands so rapidly that all the blackness within Thrall’s mind vanishes without a trace. The girl stops crying, and embraces Thrall, so that they become one.  
  
And Thrall is no more.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The vampire's death (or should I say, "death") is anti-climactic on purpose.

Of course, Horacio is a civilized, self-respecting human, and not one of those big Orc brutes who wash themselves so rarely that you have to chisel the muck of their bodies with a sharp tool. He has as high a regard for personal hygiene as the next Breton – but throughout his vagabond’s life, he has mostly been bathing in ice-cold springs and under trickling waterfalls; and later, in the rickety little bathhouse that old Etienne fashioned for his family. He has experienced the enchanting wonder that is the bathtub only a couple of times, while being allowed to stay in the manor of some wealthy merchant or noble in exchange for his sellsword services. As he recalls, on one particular occasion, he almost ended up sharing the tub with a tall, supple Altmeri maiden, the daughter of the master of the house – but the joyous pastime never came to be, because Horacio found out at the very last moment that the girl’s father was none other than the infamous necromancer that he had been tasked with stopping, and the crafty minx was planning to slit his throat while he was naked and defenseless, and take him to her daddy in a basket as a surprise gift… But that is neither here nor there; besides, he can no longer be certain how much of that story actually happened and how much is just poetic liberties, which  he took so often that he started believing his own wild fancies.  
  
The point of all of this rambling is – in the rare cases that Horacio did take a bath in a tub, he would always entertain himself by sinking into the hot, soapy water and wondering at how curiously distorted all the sounds around him were. And this is precisely what he is feeling right now – like there is some hot, bubbling liquid rippling around him, getting into his ears and muffling the noises of the nighttime forest. He jerks his head from side to side to shake off the unpleasant sensation – but he is not quite sure whether his neck has obeyed his command; or whether, in fact, his head is still attached to it, and not floating off to the other edge of the tub that he has been thrust in.  
  
To get at least some sort of grip on reality, he forces himself to finger the patch of cloth that his daughter tore off her dress and patched him up with as best she could. The little rag is wet to the touch, and lets out a funny slurping noise when he presses at it. He supposes that this makes the pain intensify – but, again, he cannot be too certain. For the pain is an ingrained part of this gigantic bath tub; it is tainting the water that envelops him, and it has already managed to drill so deep into his flesh that he cannot imagine being separated from it.  
  
Horacio winces and wriggles his fingers weakly, trying to recreate the healing spell he cast on himself when Meme left him behind and ran for help. ‘I will be fine,’ he told her back then (How many eons ago? He forgets), struggling not to let out one of those stereotypical wheezing coughs that keep interrupting the fallen hero’s never-ending final monologue in stories, ‘You go… fetch Jean… and the others… Go, my… my brave little girl…’  
  
Yes, his brave little girl. Maybe if he thinks of her, this will bolster his magic? After all, that seemed to work the first time – when he lay crushed and covered in burns, and she leaned over him, her beautiful green eyes growing swollen and teary, and he saw that her expression was no longer blank and indifferent, nothing like the cold, mask-like look that she had when she kept firing flame bolts at him, despite his pleas to stop… And he felt so proud of her. Of his brave, brave little girl. She had proven herself capable of resisting the thrall of what had to be a very powerful vampire – she had returned to him, all on her own, shaking off the monster’s shackles!  
  
He was so, so proud – and when she dropped to her knees by his side and clutched his listless, scabby, reddened hands in hers, a bright ray of golden light burst within their shared grasp. Restoration magic – stronger than any spell of this kind that he had ever managed to cast.   
  
He is still a little vague when it comes to who actually began conjuring up this bright, purifying light. Perhaps it was Meme who summoned the magic within her, trying to get her poor old Papa back to his feet, with tears still tracing broad, wet tracks down her cheeks – and he himself joined her a little later, helping her help him. Or perhaps, it was he, Horacio, who started the first, fumbling attempts to patch himself up, and then his daughter poured in her boisterous youthful life force and finished the spell that he had started.  
  
It doesn’t matter either way.   
  
What matters is that thanks to their joint effort, the healing glow wrapped around Horacio in an intricate jeweled net, and in a flash, most of the oozing, crackling burn markings were gone, as though they were baked dust, left over during the mercilessly hot drought season and then washed away by a cleansing rain. His strength returned to him, sending off an odd, excited shudder through him, head to toe – a little bit like after having a first shot of strong liquor, or placing a hand on a woman’s body – and, pointedly trying not to lean too much on Meme, or on the cane that she had handed back to him, he straightened up and faced the shadows that had been encroaching on the two of them from the other edge of the clearing.   
  
A few moments later, the shadows shaped themselves into precisely what he was expecting to see. At first glance, the apparition that wove itself out of dense, billowing black mist seemed to be a mere man, lithe, pale, dark-haired, and clad in a simple, rather weather-worn dark robe. This guise must have made the sweet, innocent child lower her guard and allow the beast to gain control over her mind. But Horacio, being more experienced, instantly spotted the unmistakable features of a creature of the night: steep cheekbones, blazing yellow eyes, and a bold purplish line crossing the lower lip, not unlike the cleft mark of a bat’s snout. And from the way his daughter reacted, he could see that the pall had fully fallen off her eyes, and she, too, was aware of the beast’s true nature.  
  
Oh, his poor, darling Meme – after casting but one fleeting look at the monster, she hid her face in her hands and let out a piteous groan. Of course, Horacio did what had to be done and, pushing her ever so slightly to get her out of the way, stepped in front of her and called out to the creature,  
  
‘If I understand your intentions, spawn of Molag Bal, you killed half my family and thralled my little girl to get to me! Well, there will be no more dirty mind tricks here! From now on, it’s me you deal with, and no-one else!’  
  
The recollection of what followed makes Horacio wince again.  
  
That was when the showdown began.  
  
Ah, how the vampire reeled and hissed when it realized that not only was Meme no longer its thrall but she also had undone all the damage she had inadvertently cost! Baring its long, slightly curved fangs, the creature leapt forward, covering the distance between itself and Horacio at breakneck speed, so that their faces, man’s and beast’s, ended up almost being crammed against one another.   
  
‘You recognize me now, do you not, Horacio Saavedra?’ it breathed slowly, its yellow eyes seeming to drill holes in his sockets. ‘You acknowledge what you did? How you made me suffer?’  
  
As he thinks back to the monster’s words, Horacio wants to spit on the ground in disgust – but all that he is capable of in his current condition is to curl his lips slightly.  
  
Back then, however, he was far more spry than this.  
  
‘Oh, you suffered, did you – you sick fuck?!’ he barked at the vampire as he conjured up his ghostly blade again, too blinded by rage to check his language in front of Meme. ‘You, who stole children from a village to rip out their throats – you fucking _suffered_ when I finished off your damned brood?! And I suppose the next thing you say will be that you destroyed my home so I would feel sorry for what I did?! Well, I’ll tell you what, you bloody bastard – I _am_ sorry! I am sorry that I didn’t check the fucking cave properly to see that none of you slithering worms escaped!’  
  
And with that, he lashed at the monster with his blade.  
  
The vampire must have been too absorbed by seething over Horacio’s tirade – and Horacio himself must have been inebriated by some kind of all-consuming, berserker rage (fueled, among other things, by yelling profanities out loud for the first time in many years). For the next thing that happened came as an equal surprise to both of them. Horacio still cannot quite believe it, as he smirks weakly and tries to shake his head, wondering at his own sudden display of strength.  
  
Ripping through the night air like a lightning bolt cracking through the leaden storm clouds, the summoned blade hacked deep into pallid undead flesh and hardened, ancient bone; with a shrill, sickening sound, which rather reminded Horacio of the loud creak of a tree that has been cut down by a lumberjack, the white clawed hand was separated from the vampire’s arm and dropped down into the grass.   
  
Meme, who was looking on at the scene, clapped her hands against her mouth, retching; while the vampire staggered backwards, stupefied by pain – which gave Horacio an excellent opportunity to stick out his cane and trip the creature, giggling wildly like a schoolboy prankster that gloats over his victim’s embarrassment.  
  
Oh gods, what a pathetic sight that blighter made, sprawled in the grass, all the frightening vampiric aura gone! Even Meme, for all the darling had suffered at the creature’s hands, could not resist a giggle as she dared to peek through her fingers at what was going on.  
  
Spurred on by his daughter’s encouragement, Horacio decided to give another heroic speech, this time less muddied by crass language. Bending over his fallen foe (and trying to make his pose look as dignified as possible), he glared right into the vampire’s twisted, livid face, and announced, pointing the tip of his summoned sword at the creature’s throat,  
  
‘You thought you were doing a noble thing, weren’t you? First killing Bastian and using his body as writing paper; then bending my Meme’s will and making her poison her own mother – you thought you were being heroic, avenging your coven? Well, you got it wrong! This is what avenging your kin looks like!’  
  
And, like a scribe making a line to mark the end of a paragraph, he slashed the blade across the vampire’s throat.  
  
Horacio smiles wryly to himself as he recollects his own exploits. It turns out that a hero’s monologue has at least one thing in common with a villain’s – they both are horribly distracting.  
  
While he was talking (and using his corner eye vision to check whether Meme was still watching), the vampire had had enough time to cast a spell similar to his. He had not noticed the small, jagged, smoke-like dagger pulsing in the creature’s claws, or the way its pose grew tenser, in preparation for a pounce, before it was too late – and just at the moment when he landed his final blow, so did the vampire.  
  
As he recalls, for a moment, they both seemed locked into a tight embrace, swaying from side to side like drunken revellers returning home from a late-night party. Then, the vampire’s body dissolved into a small cloud of ashen smoke – while his own sagged clumsily to the ground, suddenly feeling heavy like a bag of coals… and eaten away by the same hungry flame you feed coals to – for the second time this night! Only now, unlike Meme’s spell, the flame was invisible.  
  
Horacio heaves a sigh, trying and failing to heal himself once again. Damn, that bastard struck quite a blow at him! If it weren’t for Meme, he would have been finished on the spot. But the sweet child rushed up to him, and took his hand in hers once again, and did her utmost to recreate that wondrous golden magic… Still, even despite all her frantic, tearful efforts, the second spell they cast together was nowhere near that strong, and Horacio remained on the ground, feeling his body sag down to the bottom of that enormous hot tub, the world around him growing warped and alien and hard to reach out to.   
  
Meme did manage to keep him conscious, and as she took to dressing his wound, her hands shaking in a way that no young girl’s hands should, he could her hear mumbling something, in between loud gulps of air,  
  
‘Papa… Papa – I need to tell you something… About – about the soup… It didn’t happen exactly the way you said… I wasn’t…’  
  
But he shushed her before she could finish, and sent her off to the village to fetch someone who could pick him up and carry him to a place with a bed.  
  
His girl… His brave little girl. Of course, she _is_ going to blame herself for what that bloodsucker did to her. But it is not her fault. It was the vampire who took her Mama from her, and her Grandpa. She was just a tool – an obedient puppet on a string. If anyone’s to blame, it’s him. He brought it upon them – all of them. Those stupid, happy, clueless peasants. He let the vampire prey on them like a bloody wolf preys on a bunch of sheep.   
  
And not just because he let the one monster slip past him back then, in Glenumbra. No. He, the brainless old fart that he is, kept his daughter too sheltered. Too naïve. Too trusting. He wanted to keep her childhood and youth as roseate and carefree as possible – but, in truth, he made her vulnerable. He should have known better. He should have taught her one short, simple lesson: never talk to strangers. Then, none of this would have happened.  
  
He is going to tell her all of this. Give her a good, proper explanation. As soon – as soon as he rests a little. He will just… he will just close his eyes – and then, maybe, time will pass more quickly?  
  
Horacio nestles in the grass as best he can, and imagines himself being tucked away into that wonderful family heirloom of a bed that he and Annette shared. Ah, Divines bless that bed, with its soft, downy mattress, and enormous pillows that make you think you’ve just dug your head into poofy clouds… And the blanket, of course – the lovely quilted blanket that Annette crafted for them during the last months of her pregnancy, when her father eased her share of household chores.  
  
‘Gervaise, of course, kept buzzing around that he was coddling me, and that he had to remember how in the days of his youth, women would still go out into the field and reap crops until their water broke!’  
  
Horacio starts and attempts to unglue his sticky eyelids. Through the fuzzy, pearly film, he thinks he can see a familiar, curvy figure, wrapped into some sort of trailing white garment that emits a soft, soothing glow.  
  
‘Ann… Annette?’ he slurs, attempting to grope around himself to get a feel of his surroundings. Oddly enough, instead of the hard, muddy ground, his fingers brush against fresh, crispy linen. Something tells him that he should be surprised by this – but he is far too tired, and cannot be bothered by anything any longer.  
  
‘Hush, sweetheart,’ the figure says gently, spreading the good old quilt over his shoulders. ‘I know there is so much you wanted to do – and you have tried so hard to keep fighting. But you have reached the limit of your strength… You need rest. Even if it means leaving Meme behind. You need rest’.  
  
‘Mhm,’ he purrs in agreement, curling up underneath the warm blanket.  
  
And then, he sleeps.


	10. Chapter 10

Gervaise just barely remembers being poked and prodded – most rudely, too! – by her brother-in-law, and unbearably large quantities of some dense, gooey liquid (tasting like wheat gruel that had been mashed together with some disgusting fungi) being dumped down her throat till she finally mustered enough strength to yell at the bothersome man, ordering him to stop (of course, _he_ thought that this was because his stupid potion had taken effect!).  
  
Then, Horacio shuffled off, rambling something about a map and hearts and things, and left her to fend for herself. The boor!  
  
And now, after cleaning up the accursed stew and her own vomit, she has lowered herself wearily into a chair opposite her dead father and sister (if Horacio thought that she, in her frail state, would drag the two bodies to their respective bedrooms and settle them and dress them as it is proper, he was gravely mistaken!). Somewhere in a far-off corner of the house, a cricket is chirping sleepily, but otherwise, everything is quite still; she is all alone, with nothing to keep her company but two stiff, grey-faced corpses, a barren dinner table that she scrubbed clean till her fingertips began to bleed (making disgusted grimaces all the time), and her own thoughts. Which are all scrambled up right now, as Gervaise finds herself still a little dazed from the shock of being poisoned, and greatly, greatly confused. And she doesn’t like that. Neither being poisoned (well, nobody likes that, for sure) nor being confused. She has never been confused before; not once in her life. She has always been the very embodiment of sound judgment and reason, the smartest person in the household and village (in all of High Rock, too; she is fairly certain of it… and maybe even in all of Tamriel!). She has always been adamant that whatever she says or does is the only right thing to say or do – and now that she is slowly realizing that she is no longer certain about her own thoughts, it gives her an uncomfortable, even unsettling feeling, like seeing a respectable neighbour stumbling about drunk.   
  
No, she does not like being confused.  
  
The thing is – she has no idea how to feel about her sister’s death. As she looks at that frozen, silent figure in front of her, she feels that she will miss the poor, stupid Annette dearly – but that… that does not at all match the way she has been treating Annette all her life!  
  
Surely, her sister does not deserve being missed! Especially not by her, Gervaise! After all, it was Gervaise who suffered the most from what Annette did – and she did not even acknowledge it, the insensitive cow! For Annette, Gervaise has always been the ‘cute but grumpy big sister’ and later, the ‘silly dearie’ that refused to tolerate the nonsense that most of this family was up to! For as long as she can remember, Gervaise’s younger sister stubbornly refused to take her seriously – she refused to see the damage that she, Annette, was doing… simply by being there!   
  
For one thing, their mother, who came from a larger town and absolutely enchanted Gervaise with tales of the high life that she experienced while serving some grand lady, died shortly after Annette was born. Fever, the village healer (slash undertaker slash horse whisperer) said, wiping the side of his large, bulbous nose that looked like a giant red pin cushion. He never elaborated what exactly caused this fever, but Gervaise knew, even then, when she was a small, whimpering thing with buck teeth and pigtails, that it was Annette’s fault.  
  
It was all Annette’s fault that her childhood came to an abrupt end, and that instead of reading and re-reading Mother’s old books about elegant dresses, and collecting ribbons, and playing dress-up in front of the mirror (quite a rarity in these parts, and a cherished treasure for Gervaise). and daydreaming about one day going to the wondrous city of Daggerfall and bedazzling all the court ladies with her beauty and knowledge of fashion, the older sister now had to get up before the break of dawn and help Father with all those countless chores… Not to mention take care of an annoying, mewling, stinky baby that was not even smart enough to understand a basic order to ‘Shut up!’.   
  
And it was all Annette’s fault that, once the girls grew older, Gervaise made a fool of herself by struggling with tending to the house and the garden, while her little sister made it all seem so easy! Oh, she still remembers how Annette loved infuriating her by always being so cheerful about everything, and by taking great pleasure in tedious tasks like mopping the floor or helping the family next door clear their yard from goat droppings… (By the way, she still suspects that Annette was just pretending to be enjoying herself, so that Father and the other adults would praise her and point to her as an example to Gervaise, while Gervaise herself stewed in silent anger, leaning against a garden shovel with her hair standing on end and her lady-like manicure ruined… again!).  
  
Oh gods, and it was definitely Annette’s fault that, as years went by, Gervaise still remained in Father’s house, forever marked by the horrible brand ‘spinster’… And she only made it worse by rushing (or appearing to rush) to her defence whenever someone brought up Gervaise’s pathetic failure of a personal life. She would say, ‘Don’t you dare talk about my sister like that! There is no shame in not being married! She just did not find anyone worthy of her, that’s all!’ – and expected her to be thankful for that, the hypocrite!  
  
Of course, she did not find anyone worthy – she, who grew up prettifying herself with what scarce supplies she could find, and dreaming of far-off lands and storybook princes! She could never settle down for one of those lanky village boys, with their big, wiry hands and square, dirty fingernails, and the detestable habit to scratch their crotch in public! There was one man who could have been worthy – the stranger who came from a mystical, beautiful and dangerous world far beyond their village’s borders; who had seen and learned so much on his travels; who could have swept her off to a big city and showed her all the great, tall stone buildings and glimmering lights and enchanting tailor stores… but instead, ended up staying here, in the middle of nowhere, claiming that their boring, simple life was the happiest he could lead. The man who married her sister.  
  
And, of course, that was Annette’s fault, too: the plain, unrefined Annette, who did not care a whit about Mother’s fashion books, and never once put makeup on her round, ruddy face, and had calluses on her fingers from helping Father plant his precious pumpkins – she somehow managed to steal the catch that should rightfully have been her sister’s! She ruined all of Gervaise’s chances of happiness; she foiled all the plans that Gervaise had carefully been devising! And all with that innocent, idiotic smile that never left her lips – like she didn’t know!  
  
Gervaise’s handsome-stranger-hunting strategy included powdering her face till her skin seemed to flake and accosting the man in the middle of the street, batting her eyelashes fiercely – but it all went down the proverbial drain when, on one fateful day, she approached her quarry and found him with his arm around her sister’s waist, whispering something into her ear and making her snort with laughter… like the fat, content sow that she was!  
  
And on that day, all of the battered, dog-eared fashion books were hurtled out of the window, and Gervaise announced that using make-up and trying on new dresses and seeking suitors were all idle and vain pursuits. And when Horacio finally struck the final blow at her heart and married Annette, he acquired one bitter, ever-grumbling relative who contended herself by getting back at her sister in small ways, every single day, without rest, to make her defeat a little less painful (that was why she stayed in this house, where nobody cares for her or appreciates her – to try to get even… plus, someone had to oversee these blundering peasants who can’t string two coherent thoughts together to save their lives!).  
  
And now, her sister, her life-long rival – her nemesis even – is gone. Never again shall she stand in her way; never again shall she ruin her life. She should be happy – she should be relieved! But instead, she just feels… empty. Tired. And sad. Like from now on, there will be a part of her missing. A part that she did not even realize was special. Maybe that is because she grew so accustomed to saying all those little nasty things to Annette on a daily basis, only to have them roll off her like drops of muddy water off a duck’s back, and think of new nasty things, which, this time, should definitely hurt her feelings…  
  
She wonders: does everyone feel this way when someone who has been making them miserable in finally out of the picture? Does everyone’s struggle with their nemesis end so… disappointingly?  
  
It feels like there will be no end to her musings – but a moment comes when they finally are interrupted by a creak of the front door and the sound of heavy, slow footsteps. This must be Horacio returning from whatever escapade he was off on… Oh – oh my… Gervaise wrinkled cheeks are touched by a deep, dark flush as she gasps at her own thoughts. What if – what if she comes up to him, to the poor widower who has just lost his wife (oh, and father-in-law; she has been so focused on her life-long resentment towards her sister that she forgot to pay her respects to Father – well, the poor old codger had it coming anyway; ah well) and comforts him? Maybe it’s not too late for them to come together? Two old, lonely souls finally joining like they were supposed to all along – because she deemed it so? Maybe they could…  
  
‘Hello? Is anyone there?’  
  
That’s not Horacio’s voice; that’s Jean again! What does he want now?!  
  
‘They are all gone, Jean. All except my aunt’.  
  
And that – that is the girl’s voice!  
  
Gervaise breathes deeply through her nostrils. Oh, she may not be certain how to feel about Annette – but she is more than certain how to feel about her offspring!   
  
She has detested the annoying brat from the moment she was born – another baby that did nothing useful but drool, bawl, and soil herself, over and over and over again! And, just as with Annette, things only got worse when the spawn grew older! All that running about the house, ruining the furniture, breaking things apart just to see what was inside of them – and instead of shouting at her and spanking her like Gervaise (the only responsible adult around!) did, the rest of the family just awwed and cooed about how the child was exploring the world… ‘just like her Papa!’.  
  
That was what made the young Remedios even harder to tolerate than the young Annette: all those incessant reminders that she was sired by the man that should have belonged to Gervaise (and, of course, if he did, there would have been no useless, bratty children running around _their_ house!). Of course, the hateful little thing insisted on rubbing it in, too – always prattling about how she and Papa did this and she and Papa did that, and how she will be just like Papa when she grows up! All with one, single purpose: making Gervaise’s life even more unbearable!  
  
And now it looks like her feelings towards her niece were more than well-placed: the little snake has surpassed her mother by far! Poisoning her, Gervaise (and the rest of the family along with her) – now, that is something that Annette would never have thought of, with that sluggish brain of hers! And now she dares to come back here! She dares to announce that they are all dead – she dares to outright confess that she has slaughtered her entire family!  
  
  
Oooh, Gervaise is more than certain that on her way home, the girl has spun all sorts of lies to her father (who dotes on her… naturally) – she may even have convinced her that it was the ‘evil old aunt’ who did all of this! Oh, she will deal with her! As gods are her witnesses, she will! She will open Horacio’s eyes on what sort of monster his ‘sweet little Meme’ is!  
  
Pushing back her chair with a force that one might not expect from a recently-poisoned old lady, Gervaise marches towards the front door to intercept her brother-in-law and his murdering scum of a daughter. But when she catches sight of who has come in, it makes her blood run cold – and then reach boiling point anew, with another onset of anger and hatred.  
  
The deathly quiet of the house has been disturbed by Jean and the village’s only guard; in between them, they are carrying a make-shift stretcher, which is sagging in under the weight of some large, human-like shape. The exact details are hidden from view by a large white sheet, which the men must have torn off someone’s clothes line on their way here, for there are still a couple of wooden pegs dangling off its corner – and over the sheet, like a sword marking the barrow of a fallen war lord, lies the all too familiar cane…  
  
The little murderer walks slowly by the stretcher’s side, resting her hand on its edge; her face is cast down, and she is as silent as the corpses at the table. Playing the part of a dutiful, mourning daughter, is she? Well, it’s about time that she is unmasked!  
  
‘You! You little harlot!’ Gervaise shrieks, rushing forward – and feeling rather surprised by the gurgling sound of tears in her voice. Weren’t tears one of the so many things that are beneath her – one of the cunning devices Annette and Remedios once used to disturb her?  
  
‘You killed him too, didn’t you?! You killed your own father – you killed Horacio! My Horacio! Oh gods, he should have been mine! If he only listened to me, if he only looked at me – he would never have ended up being tethered to Annette and spawning the demon child who killed him! Ooooh, my Horacio!’  
  
‘Yes,’ the girl cuts short her aunt’s wailing.  
  
Her voice is even and emotionless (like a murderer’s voice should be, of course!), and her eyes are completely dry… But – but there’s something in them, something that makes Gervaise instantly snap her mouth shut. Looking at her is like looking at herself in the mirror. The girl’s eyes are those of an old woman. A bitter, weary old woman that once, long ago, fell in love with a handsome stranger and had her heart smashed to pieces.  
  
‘Yes,’ Remedios repeats, still without an inkling of emotion. ‘I killed him. I killed him, and Mama, and Grandpa, and almost killed you. I am the only one who is responsible for their deaths, and for your pain. Do what you will with me’.  
  
The guard and Jean, who have been looking on with their eyes bulging like those of the thoroughbred ladies’ lapdogs Gervaise’s mother once told her about, let out a loud gasp in unison.  
  
‘What are you saying, girl?!’ Jean pants.  
  
The guard, too, joins in, his moustache quivering emphatically.  
  
‘I don’t believe you! It’s – it’s the grief talking, for sure! We will have to send you to a bigger town, where there are more guards, and judges, and clever people! They will listen to your story and decide…’  
  
‘No,’ Gervaise interrupts, her voice just as cold and firm as Remedios’.  
  
Her moaning outburst has subsided, and she now feels strangely bolstered and light-headed. The demise of one nemesis may have left her confused – but finishing with this one will be a triumph!  
  
‘The girl says she is guilty, and I _know_ she is guilty! She planned a cold-blooded murder of her own parents! She is clearly vile and cunning well beyond her years – if you take her away from the village, she will seize the chance to escape… perhaps by carving through your bodies to make way! And besides, what would a judge sentence her to? She’d just be beheaded – two seconds on her knees at the block, and it is all over! That is no punishment for what she did! She needs to die in slow agony, with plenty of time to ponder over her family’s suffering!’  
  
She takes a moment to catch her breath – and to savour the looks on everyone’s faces. Oh, no-one gets away with trying to poison her, Gervaise, and for taking her Horacio from her… for the second time! No-one – especially not this little brat!  
  
‘I say,’ she announces slowly after deeming the pause dramatic enough, ‘I say that we lock her up… in the House of Krex!’


	11. Chapter 11

On a tall rocky outcrop in the foothills of the Druadach mountains, sheltered by age-old Wyrd trees and overlooking a quaint, sleepy hamlet near the border between High Rock and Skyrim, stands the House of Krex. Long ago, when the village elders were but small children, this stately mansion used to serve as an idyllic summer getaway for a wealthy Imperial family; they would come to this remote corner of the lush green wilds to give some ‘much-needed air’ to their son, an aloof, bookish child with an uncanny talent for magic – especially the Destruction school.  
  
Their sojourns ended on the day that is still gossiped about on the long, dark autumn evenings, when the wind sings melancholy, ominous songs in the chimneys, and the rustle of every leaf seems to sound like the footfalls of the unquiet dead.   
  
The boy, aged around thirteen at the time, summoned an enormous fire ball (its size seems to grow with every consecutive retelling of the story) and, perhaps out of spite towards his parents for dragging him all the way out here, or as part of some failed arcane experiment, or maybe just out of boredom – burned down one of the mansion’s wings.   
  
The Krexes moved out, packing their things in haste before the smoke cleared, and were never heard from again – but rumour has it that the young master’s meddling with magic claimed the lives of some household servants, whose death were (quite naturally) hushed up by the family. Based on this grizzly addition to the place’s story, the House of Krex is believed to be haunted. No-one in their right mind has ever strayed into this part of the woods, and even the retired adventurer that decided to settle down in the village preferred to steer clear of the abandoned mansion.  
  
And it is in these desolate, cobwebbed rooms that the village folk decided to lock up the Prisoner. For what she had done could never be forgiven, and every possible punishment was too lenient for her but the cruelest one. And what could be more cruel than isolating her in the cold and dark and quiet, with her heart always being torn up by fear of being strangled by a vengeful spirit?  
  
The front door, which the Krexes did not even bother to lock properly as they fled from the destruction wrought by their son, has long since rotted away. But the few brave souls that dared to approach the solemn building (in broad daylight, of course – with their faces sweating so hard that the glow of the sun on their skin made it look like they were wearing golden masks) did their utmost to reinforce it, to prevent the Prisoner from getting away.   
  
Not that she would try to. No matter what some feared, no matter what some hissing tongues whispered in the tremulous crowd behind her back, she would never think of getting away. For she is perfectly aware of what a horrible sin she had committed, and nobody hates her more for her crime than she herself.  
  
But they did not know what she felt, as they dragged her uphill, prodding her back with a pitchfork (for lack of any proper weapons in their sleepy little settlement). They did not know what pain gripped her on the inside when they pushed her into the empty hallway (together with a food basket, provided by the Prisoner’s aunt… but not to care for her; rather, to extend her torment by keeping her alive for as long as possible). They did not know that while, with their fingers jerking and refusing to obey them, they barricaded the door behind her, this pain swelled and mounted and turned into sick, masochistic pleasure. They did not know that, as soon as the rustling of the grass under their stumbling feet faded away, the Prisoner flung herself onto the mildewed floor and spread out her arms, as though ready to embrace her prison, a vague smile playing on her lips as she stared at the tall, vaulted ceiling over her head and, gloating at her own suffering, counted the heavy beats of her broken heart.  
  
They did not know that she lay like this the whole day, and well into the night, her face blank like a sleepwalker’s, waiting for the ghosts from the spooky stories she heard as a girl to come and claim her – her smile growing broader as she imagined the relish with which the spirits would tear her apart.  
  
They never came, however – the cobwebbed halls remained completely silent until dawn broke and a sleepy rooster croaked hoarsely somewhere far downhill. But, disappointed though she felt at first, that did not make her sentence any milder. After all, she had her own ghosts to keep her company – a stern, silent trio, always looming over her, always watching her, always being able to see into her very heart. A withered, toothless old man with piteously arched eyebrows and wispy strands of white hair floating behind the speckled dome of his bald head; a buxom middle-aged woman, with her face buried in her large, callused hands, as though she was weeping; and another man, whose features were always obscured from the Prisoner because she dared not to look at him.  
  
And they are still here, chained to her by an unbreakable bond, their shadows weighing on her like a ball of lead. For they are the most persistent, the most ever-lasting ghosts of all; they are far stronger than any apparition that could be sliced up by an adventurer and trickle down into a sticky puddle of ectoplasm – they are the ghosts that do not exist outside her mind.  
  
At first, she had no intention of ever getting up or touching the food that was left for her. It was a pity that the House of Krex was not haunted and that she could not die screaming and bleeding like she deserved – but she could still starve herself, and appease the silent shades inside her head by letting them watch her body waste away into nothing and merge with the dust that surrounded her.  
  
But, ironically, she was prevented from doing so by one of those very ghosts – by one of her own victims. By the shade whose face she does not dwell on, whose name she does not dare utter. By the man she betrayed and abandoned, allowing him to die from the wound he had received in a terribly short, almost comical battle with the monster she herself had set loose on him.  
  
For in life, this man had the blood of an adventurer flowing through his veins, pumping boisterous strength into his body, pushing him to explore new horizons, to keep walking down unknown roads till he could walk no more and had to stay and rest. The Prisoner shares the same blood, whether she wills it or not – and eventually, it was this blood that commanded her to get up, and munch on some stale bread to soothe her growling stomach, and (once her knees stopped wobbling and her head stopped spinning after being plunged into a half-dazed stupor for so long) explore her new surroundings.  
  
And she keeps exploring them to this day – for how long exactly, she cannot tell. The house’s windows are either boarded up or draped with thick, moth-eaten curtains, which means that it is plunged into perpetual dusk, which the Prisoner’s mage light spells just barely alleviate, and it is nigh on impossible to tell day from night, let alone account for longer stretches of time. She tried to keep track of every passing month based on how many time she began to bleed, but soon lost count. Days, weeks, and months no longer exist for her; time has been lumped together into an endless cycle of sleeping and being awake.  
  
There is only one thing that indicates, at least somehow, how much time has passed: it has most certainly been very, very long since she has nibbled down all the supplies in her basket. After running out of the first batch of food, she has been sustaining herself by the little drops that, every once in a while, some kind soul (perhaps one of those villagers who never truly believed in her guilt… the foolish, blind dears) smuggles to her, squeezing loaves of bread and cheese wedges and leather flasks with water, for drinking and washing herself, through the most unexpected cracks in the walls.  
  
Given all the stories about this dismal place, it must take that unseen benefactor, whoever he or she is, a great deal of courage to keep approaching the House of Krex – and if she could, the Prisoner would have thanked them, if not for their kindness (for she does not deserve it) at least for their bravery… But she does not think she knows how. She does not think she will ever bring herself to talk to another human being. There is just no room for that in that world any more.  
  
When she was young, her world was enormous, bright and beautiful, reaching out as far as her eyes could see, holding wondrous secrets and treasures behind every corner. But now, her world is only as big as the abandoned manor that she has been locked in; the House of Krex might as well have been suspended in the middle of the night sky, with nothing but starry blackness outside its doors – for her prisoner has now become her sole plane of existence. Her entire life is now dedicated to unearthing the secrets that are concealed behind closed doors and in the dark ends of empty hallways. When she first came here, she expected to see ghosts – but now she is like a ghost herself, gliding down dank corridors, silent and alone; for most of the time, she ambles about completely naked and the pallor of her skin gleams through the murk like an otherworldly aura.  
  
She has discarded her dress because she sees no use in it, with no-one being able to see her – and besides, as she looks herself over, she always keeps remembering that fateful day when she prettified herself in her family’s bath house… before… before meeting…   
  
It is too much for her to bear, and she delights in the agony she is causing herself when glancing at her own naked body. For she deserves it – she deserves this pain, and ever so much more.  
  
The Prisoner has discovered many things while moving, ghost-like, from room to room, and has familiarized herself with various odds and ends on the shelves and in the cupboards till she could reach out for them with her eyes closed). She has filled her time by reading all the books in the abandoned library, and fitting countless random combinations for the cast-iron safe in the master bedroom (she cackled with hoarse, barely sane laughter when the safe finally swung ajar and revealed a neat stack of septims) and finishing the embroidery that the mistress of the house must have started before her entire family was uprooted and had to move out (of course, her stitching is childish and clumsy compared to Lady Krex’s – but she did her best).  
  
On particularly dark days, she goes down to the kitchen, and rummages in the creaking drawers for the mouldy old crockery, setting the table for five – and then stands in the corner, picturing herself as she hovered behind her mother’s back, ready to slip the lethal poison into the bubbling soup… And bends in two, her long, silent sobs racking her body. And when she is feeling slightly more light-hearted, she amuses herself by going to the sitting room and studying the crackling portraits in peeling gilded frames – all of them with thin, pursed lips, elongated earlobes and jutting noses, even the young, frail-necked boy, with tiny blue veins twisting underneath the thin layer of skin around his eyes and his small hands closed round a spell book. His visage, rather haughty for someone so young, is the last in the family gallery; the Prisoner always smiles when she reaches his portrait, as though greeting an old friend – and he is her friend, in a way, despite all the decades that separate them.   
  
She could not explore his room, as it must have been located in the part of the manor that got burned down and is now sealed off from the rest of the house by a few boards, hastily hammered together, and a crumbled wall. But she _has_ found various journals, scattered all over the place, all signed in bold, carefully traced letters,  
  
‘PROPERTY OF FESTUS KREX, AGE 13’ (or sometimes ‘12’ or ‘11’, depending on the journal).  
  
The next few pages after the title are always covered with emphatic threats of being burned alive, dashed down in faded ink and addressed to whoever dares to read the journal without Festus’ consent. They make the Prisoner smile, quite in spite of herself, as she remembers the boys in her village and the elaborate insults they yelled at each other during the usual childish scuffles (though, of course, detailed descriptions of charred human flesh are far more impressive than ‘your mother is a hamster!’).   
  
After the threats end, the most fascinating scribbles begin. Young Festus certainly has a remarkable talent for magic; at an age when the Prisoner was struggling to make a single spark of fire appear at the snap of her fingers, this ingenious little boy already seemed to be devising incantations of his own. She has even tested a couple of them out, shooting lightning bolts from one corner of the sitting room to another, with Mama Krex looking on in distaste out of her picture frame.   
  
Her little displays of destructive power have inevitably ended in her coming up to the boy’s portrait, leaning close to his gaunt, arrogant little face, and saying (or rather, breathing in a wheezing half-whisper, for she is steadily losing the ability to properly control her voice),  
  
‘Yes, I know what you are thinking, Festus… Why don’t I use one of your nifty little spells to blast down the doors and just walk out of here? Well, the thing is… I don’t want to. I – I don’t belong out there. They were right to lock me up – and so I will stay locked up until… until this ends’.  
  
And she has really meant this, too – it is no accident that, the moment she was brought here, she stopped mentally referring to herself by her name, and has taken to calling herself just ‘the Prisoner’. This is what she is now – she is the prisoner of this house, her guilt, the shadows inside her mind. She is the Prisoner, and nobody else; and this is how things shall remain for all eternity… Or so she thinks.  
  
For one day (or maybe one night… One morning? One evening?), as she is sitting cross-legged on the floor of the entrance room, immersed in the third volume of _Brief History of the Empire_ , a strange noise breaks the familiar silence, making her whirl to her feet and fling the book somewhere into a far corner.  
  
A slow, faltering knock on the front door.  
  
The Prisoner tensens, her heartbeat quickening. What – what could this mean? Nobody has ever approached the House of Krex so boldly, so directly, not since she was thrown inside! Even the unknown friend that has been keeping her fed has never dared to come up to the front door! She – she must have misheard it! It has to be a tree branch brushing against the wood, or… or…  
  
The knocking repeats, slightly louder this time – and afterwards, comes another noise, muffled but unmistakable. A woman’s sob.   
  
Utterly perplexed, the Prisoner slowly moves towards the door till her fingertips touch the old, splintered wood. Her heart is now pounding so loudly that her ears being to ring and she can barely keep up a steady stance. What could this mean? Who is this woman? Why is she crying? Maybe she feels terrified after coming this far (who wouldn’t?!) – or maybe she is hurt and needs help?.. But in the latter case, why would she appeal to _her_ , of all people? What could possibly be going on out there to make her…  
  
The woman sobs again, and the sound stirs a half-forgotten feeling in the Prisoner’s heart. She has been spending so much time hating herself that she has nearly forgotten what it’s like to have feelings towards someone else – feelings of pity, and empathy, and an overwhelming, inexplicable desire to help.  
  
The Prisoner’s fingers clench and unclench, as she prepares to cast a fire spell to burn a hole through the age-old, hardened wood – but then extinguishes the spark before it begins to grow into a burning orb, feeling a flush scorch her cheeks. By the gods – she is naked!  
  
Suddenly overcome by a shortness of breath, the Prisoner darts away from the door, hastily tears off a curtain from the nearest window, setting off an enormous, billowing cloud of dust, and wraps the heavy, grimy fabric around her like a toga. Her deafening, barking cough, which she cannot contain as the dust gets into every possible orifice on her face, must have scared the mysterious woman off – for, just as she charges up the spell anew, the Prisoner thinks she can hear someone’s footsteps, scurrying off, and by the time she releases the orb and it eats through the door, there is no-one there to greet her.  
  
‘Hey!’ the Prisoner says thickly, starting at the odd sound of her voice, which sticks to her throat and scrapes against it harder than the dust did. ‘Hey! Wait! Who are you?! What’s – what’s wrong?!’  
  
As she staggers forward, right into the sweltering crucible of unbearably bright sunlight, the call of the adventurer’s blood grows louder than ever before. She must go after that woman; she must investigate what happened! Even if that means leaving the House of Krex, her prison and her world, and venturing forth into the unknown realm that, an eternity ago, used to be her home.


	12. Chapter 12

The way downhill proves to be an excruciating challenge, what with all the fresh air making the Prisoner’s temples drum with dull pain, and with all the sunlight lashing at her sallow skin and burning into her eyes till huge, murky, whitish teardrops glue her eyelids together, making it hard to tell the ground from the sky. Her legs, too, barely obey her, having not had much exercise other than occasionally trotting up- or downstairs in the manor, and her narrow chest begins rising and falling rapidly after every few steps, so that she has to stop and rest, leaning against a tree trunk.  
  
The world outside the House of Krex dazzles her with its sounds and colours and smells – it must be summertime, for there are so many of them that she can hardly bear it. The birds are straining themselves to bursting point, their shrill voices drilling into her skull; and the air stifles her with a dense, earthy odour, and ripples with countless shades of green that send blurred circles floating before her eyes. Add to that the tiny, prickly twigs that pierce the bare soles of her feet, and the whip-like nettles that sting at her calves… Gods, if she knew that going out of the house was such agony, she would have attempted it more often, just for the sake of adding up to her well-deserved suffering!  
  
Now and again, she glances over her shoulder, fixing her gaze longingly on the sombre outlines of her prison, which she can still see looming over the lush, painfully bright greenery – but every time she does so, she instantly remembers the sobs that she heard, and forces herself to look away and focus on the road ahead.   
  
When the outskirts of the village finally begin to separate themselves from the green haze ahead of her, the Prisoner is overcome by even more misgivings. Who knows how the villagers will react when they see her emerge out of the supposedly haunted mansion, after all this time? Who is to say that they will not kill her on sight, remembering what a horrendous act she had committed? That is, if they recognize her… But if they don’t, this will not make things any better.   
  
Back in the House of Krex, there are a couple of full-length mirrors, still left intact. The Prisoner remembers standing in front of them, fixing her glare on her reflection’s eyes and whispering a feverish recollection of the living nightmare that brought her here. She ended up smashing one of these mirrors, howling in helpless rage and self-hatred; but the other survived, and she would return to it sometimes to gloat over her own monstrosity. She knows what her incarceration, with a dwindling supply of food and water and no sunlight to speak of, has turned her into. She knows that she is now barely more than a walking skeleton, with greyish, porous skin stretched over awkwardly bulging joints.  
  
Even though the Krexes left in a hurry, they grabbed most of the personal hygiene supplies, like razors and hair brushes, with them – and even if they hadn’t, the Prisoner would not have cared much about prettifying her appearance anyway. So her legs are covered in the same dark frizz that used to disgust her so much, and her head is capped by matted, wool-like, lackluster hair, which once or twice turned into a veritable tavern for the lice (she smoked the scurrying little critters out by casting a life-draining spell on them, and then cut off most of her tangled locks with a dull kitchen knife and burned them in the cold stone fireplace; as she was watching the flame tongues devour the shorn-off strands of hair, she thought she could see a few streaks of grey snaking against the dark-red background – and shrugged her shoulders indifferently at the discovery).  
  
So, if she returns now, her former neighbours will see her either as a loathsome criminal who has escaped her shackles, or as a grotesque ghoul stumbling out of the forest in search of brains to chew on. Maybe she should turn back – maybe she should return to the life that has now been allotted to her? Maybe she should ignore this nagging little voice at the back of her head that urges her to probe, to explore, to investigate?.. Maybe…  
  
Carried away by her own musings, the Prisoner allows her feet to continue mechanically moving one in front of the other, and does not even notice how she suddenly steps into the middle of a village street. When it finally dawns on her that the uneven, prickly surface of the forest path beneath her soles has been replaced by the smooth, soft layer of dust, she starts and blinks her way back to reality… And when the picture clears, the Prisoner gasps and takes a few staggering steps back, struck by shock.  
  
It is as if the street is lined by countless, miniature copies of the House of Krex, all with boarded-up doorways and black, blind windows that seem to breathe out icy cold silence. An uncomfortable shiver crawling down her spine, as though the lice have returned and are up to their antics again, the Prisoner walks up one of the empty porches and peers inside through a gaping window.   
  
At first, her vision is blackened by the stark contrast between the sunny street and the dim exterior of the empty home; but as her eyes have long since become used to the perpetual dusk of the House of Krex, they adjust to the lighting shift fairly quickly, and the Prisoner begins to discern large, greyish, angular shapes: a bed, a couple of chairs, a table… All of these forlorn pieces of furniture look exactly like the ones in the manor: like they have not known the touch of a caring host for quite a while now; no-one has been here to wipe the dust or sweep off the cobwebs or change the linen. No-one has sat in those chairs or lain on those sheets or stepped on those floorboards – she can feel it. She knows desolation when she sees it.  
  
The Prisoner draws back, pressing her hand against her forehead. What could this mean? Did everyone abandon the village?.. But why – or when? How long has it been since she was locked up? How many… years?  
  
‘He-hello? Who is this… Are you – are you her? Please let me see your face!’  
  
This quiet, timorous plea rolls through the heavy silence like a rumble of thunder; the Prisoner leaps what feels like a couple of feet into the air and swerves her head, hear fingers clasped over a jerking vein in her throat.  
  
When she turns around, she finds herself facing a short, broad-hipped woman, with a dark hooded cloak thrown over her upper body so that it completely obscures her face. Her voice, however, seems to sound familiar; the Prisoner frowns, rummaging through the corners of her memory that she did not care to explore before. For all this time, she has been focused solely on reliving the torment of her last night in the village – but there have been so many other nights before it, and days, too: happy, carefree days, when she was a quick-footed, cheery little, exploring the woods with her father… or playing with other children.  
  
She remembers it now: herself, dancing off on some escapade, and panting, chubby youngsters trying to keep up as best they could. Gustave and Susanne, brother and sister, two years and a year older than her, respectively – and yet, always at her beck and call. They were her ever-faithful audience when she excitedly retold the stories of her Papa’s adventures, and her supporting cast when she decided to re-enact them; sometimes (even though Papa was always against it) they even became her obedient guinea pigs when she wanted to try out a new potion. They little short of worshipped her, like a tiny, red-haired goddess; and she always took their admiration for granted – it was only due place, since her father was an adventurer, and theirs was a simple ploughman.   
  
When she and her little wingkids grew a little older, the future Prisoner became a slightly condescending but infinitely patient confidante for Susanne, who, like most of the other village girls, had a crush on poor Bastian, and a battle-ready second for Gustave, always standing up for him when the other young lads began mocking him for his flabby tummy and protruding ears. In return, the two siblings continued to shower their red-haired heroine in adoration. She distanced herself from them, however, when she thought she had found the love of her life; she no longer came by to visit them, or invited them to play games or take walks around the village and its outskirts like the three of them usually did; and when they tried to get her to talk to them, she usually just brushed them off with a vague smile and say that she was too busy right now.   
  
Of course she did, the stupid, blind, senseless little wretch – she thought she was a grown woman now; and grown women did not need ‘childhood chums’ like Gus and Susie, as she used to call them… And they would call her…  
  
‘Meme!’ the woman calls out breathlessly, making the Prisoner start again. Yes – oh gods, yes; that is definitely Susie’s voice!  
  
‘Meme! You – you are alive! Oh, I knew it! I always knew it! I told Gus you were picking up the food we left for you!’  
  
‘You…’ the Prisoner’s first attempt at speaking fails miserably, as her voice turns into a barely audible hiss.  
  
She clears her throat and tries again, this time managing to gain at least some control over her voice’s volume,  
  
‘You were the one who..?’  
  
‘Yes!’ the woman nods enthusiastically, clutching the rim of her hood so it does not slide back. ‘Me and my big brother! We have been at it all these three years!’  
  
Three years… It has been three years? Only three years? By the looks of the village, the Prisoner was ready to assume that at least a decade has passed. Where could everyone have gone off to? What did she miss? And oh – she is a whole whopping twenty years old now! Well, nineteen-something, to be more precise; but she vaguely recalls being fond of rounding these things up.  
  
While the Prisoner is processing all this new information, the cloaked woman chirps on, apparently unable to contain the excitement of seeing her old friend again.  
  
‘I told Gus we had to take care of you – he was scared, of course; thought the ghosts would grab him and drag him off! I had to kick him all the way uphill every time, and he whined and whimpered like a babe as I looked for gaps in the walls to drop down some supplies for you! Ah, but we should have come more often – look at how thin and pale you are! But we had to sneak off unnoticed, see: almost the whole town started hating you so much, thanks to your aunt… But we believed in you – we always believed in you! Whatever your aunt said, whatever rumours she started, me and Gus never cared to listen to her! Not for one second! She kept saying that you had killed off your whole family – but that can’t be true!’  
  
‘Wait!’ the Prisoner cuts in, her heart thudding at the mention of her aunt.  
  
The spiteful old biddy never bore love for her, but the Prisoner cannot blame her for that. And not only because she knows that she deserved every bit of her aunt’s hatred for what she did. Gervaise’s outburst over Papa’s body made the Prisoner realize that the poor old thing had been in love with him, all these years, and as he chose Mama over her, it must have turned her into the bitter, miserable crone that her niece had come to know her as. So now, with ‘her Horacio’ and the rest of the family gone, she must be feeling terribly lonely. This thought fills the Prisoner with overwhelming pity towards Gervaise; the feeling is so strong that for a moment, it even overshadows the pang of guilt that disturbed her bleeding heart when Susie insisted on her innocence.    
  
‘What – what became of Aunt Gervaise?’ the Prisoner persists hoarsely. ‘How is she?’  
  
The hooded woman lowers her head.  
  
‘She – she died,’ she says simply, with her tone instantly losing its cheerful spark. ‘Not too long ago. I… I am sorry if I sounded insensitive just now. She was almost completely crazy in the end – but she was still your aunt, and…’  
  
‘Thank you’, the Prisoner responds, her voice quiet and hollow.  
  
She shouldn’t be surprised: few people would have survived through the torture that she subjected Gervaise to, by taking away everyone she cared about: her father, her sister, and the wonderful, brave adventurer that had captivated her heart…  
  
Susie coughs, breaking the short silence that followed the Prisoner’s remark. Even with her face hidden from view, it is evident from her posture that she is very nervous about something.  
  
‘If – if you don’t mind… There is something I need to show you. It’s, uh, connected to why I dared to run up the hill again and knock on your door. I – I just did not know where else to turn. You have seen what happened to the village; I – I figured you would be the only one left who wasn’t…’  
  
‘Wasn’t what?’ the Prisoner asks, an unnerving feeling mounting in the pit of her stomach, as though someone is slowly beginning to tie her innards into a tight, gruesome braid.  
  
‘You’ll see,’ Susie says, fingering her hood again. ‘Just – just promise you won’t turn away… I know you might want to, because – because it’s too scary… too disturbing… But – please promise you won’t leave, despite what you see! It was so hard for me to sneak off and call for you, harder than ever before, what with us being… being watched all the time… And when I ran back, I was so afraid you would not come… But – but you did come, and…’  
  
‘Just get on with it!’ the Prisoner snaps, in a tone that resembles the way she once urged her little sidekicks to stop dallying behind and ‘come see the thing’ or ‘come do the thing’.   
  
‘Whatever you show me, I’m sure I can handle it!’  
  
‘All right, then!’  
  
With that, Susie takes a deep, resolute breath and pulls back her hood.


	13. Chapter 13

As the coarse, simple, home-spun fabric rolls back, it unmasks Susie’s features. True to her promise, the Prisoner does not let a single sound escape her lips; nor does she start or shudder or back away – but deep inside her, she feels some tense chord first quiver, and then snap in two.  
  
It appears that the Prisoner is not the only one has who changed over these three years; in fact, if she had not first heard Susie’s voice, she would have scarcely recognized her. The lovely, heart-shaped face the she remembers is now warped into some semblance of a round sliver of tree bark, coarse and gnarled and dark-reddish in colour; and like fungi cling on to trees, so do large, glistening pustules cling on to Susie’s temples and the corners of her jaw. A few other pustules have already popped, and there is yellow pus sticking to the poor woman’s skin where they once were. The glistening, slug-like trail continues down Susie’s throat, which is just as red as her face; this makes the Prisoner fathom a guess that these horrible markings must be covering her entire body.  
  
Blushing in helpless shame under the other woman’s intent, silent gaze (which tints her skin an even deeper shade of red), Susie readjusts her hood and says, turning away from her former childhood friend,  
  
‘I look so monstrous now, don’t I?’  
  
 _Better than being monstrous on the inside,_ the Prisoner remarks darkly to herself – but what she says aloud is just one short, simple question,  
  
‘What happened to you?’  
  
‘Not just me,’ Susie says darkly, motioning the Prisoner to follow her down the street.  
  
Walking side by side, the two women pass even more empty houses, all huddled together amid withered, dead vegetable patches. Some doors have been hammered shut, like the one that the Prisoner has recently inspected; and others have been left wide ajar, creaking mournfully in the wind that blows small clouds of dust along the silent walkway.  
  
‘It happened to the whole village,’ Susie comments, coming up to one of the abandoned cottages and passing her hand – which, as the Prisoner has only just noticed, it just as red and swollen as her face – along the cracked clay flower pot that still sits perched on the windowsill.   
  
Her gesture, which resembles a soft, soothing caress given to someone who has succumbed to a debilitating illness, must have shifted the flowerpot, just one fraction of an inch – for the colourless, wrinkled petals of the tiny blossom, which is still drooping down to the dried-up soil, suddenly float down to the windowsill, and the withered yellow stalk crumbles into dust. Both women look away from the pitiful sight and walk on; as they do, Susie forces herself to continue,  
  
‘You see now? Nothing was safe from this evil… thing. It just swept over us like a river during spring flood, and before we knew it, we had all fallen sick, and our gardens had grown black and empty, and… Look out!’  
  
Startled by Susie’s exclamation, the Prisoner glances down at the dusty road. As it turns out, she has almost tripped over the skull of some animal – goat, maybe? – which looks back at her mournfully with its deep, empty sockets. The Prisoner walks around it carefully, shaking her head in stunned disbelief.  
  
So this is what she missed. A bloody plague! Oh gods, why did her poor neighbours had to suffer from so many misfortunes?! First – first her; and now this!  
  
These are the thoughts that first being hammering at the inside of the Prisoner’s skull as she walks through the deserted streets next to Susie (now looking around instinctively to check for more goat skulls). But then, come other thoughts – thoughts that would have crossed the mind of someone like her Papa; someone experienced and observant and eager to look for the root of every problem. It looks like the adventurer’s spirit within her has not grown any weaker.  
  
This does not make a lot of sense, she says to herself. Plagues are usually passed on from person to person, right? Or from animal to person to person, or… That is, books say that plagues tend to start in crowded cities, where a lot of strangers come and go, and where there are lots of filthy animals scurrying about, like sewer rats or something… But this hamlet is so isolated, so remote, and strangers visit here so rarely – where could the disease have come from?  
  
‘And that is not all,’ Susie goes on with her explanation, ‘The worst thing is, nobody died from this sickness’.  
  
The Prisoner staggers to a halt and looks over her companion in confusion.  
  
‘I don’t follow’, she confesses bluntly.  
  
‘You’ve seen me, haven’t you?’ Susie says, also stopping; her voice is beginning to sound unsteady with tears. ‘Death would have been a relief, a blessing!’   
  
She makes a short pause to catch her breath, and then adds apologetically,  
  
‘Actually… What I said earlier about your aunt… No, I shouldn’t… I’ve shocked you enough by all this…’  
  
The Prisoner claps her hand against her stomach to prevent that uncomfortable feeling from building up again.  
  
‘Come on, spit it out!’ she wheezes, trying to show that she remains undaunted. ‘You said she died; did it have to do with this madness?’ She waves her arms around in a broad gesture, outlining the borders of the village. ‘But you just mentioned that nobody died from the disease, so…’  
  
Susie inclines her head, sighing sadly.  
  
‘She didn’t die from the disease, Meme… She… We – we found her. Dead. In your family’s bathhouse. She locked herself inside and blocked the chimney and heated up the stove; she may have thrown in some of your father’s old potion ingredients, too… And the smoke got to her’.  
  
The Prisoner moans weakly, clutching her stomach even tighter. Poor, poor old Aunt Gervaise! Of course, she would not have borne the pain of turning into a disfigured plague husk!.. As the realization of how terrible her aunt’s end was begins to sink in, the Prisoner catches herself wondering if Gervaise could have been saved. Maybe if Susie had come for her earlier – or if she had decided to leave her prison of her own accord? Maybe then, she could have burst in and dragged the silly old crone out by the hair and told her sternly to stay away from stoves until she finds a way to fix this?.. Ah, who is she trying to fool – she would have never been capable of saving her aunt. She couldn’t even save her father – she was too dumb and scared to use her own magic to keep that accursed monster from running him through! She…  
  
‘Uh, Meme?’ Susie remarks, trying to sound as unobtrusive as possible. ‘We – we should get going. I still have things to show and explain to you before _he_ begins to suspect that I am up to something. _He_ doesn’t like it when I miss _his_ talks, and frankly, I did not think ahead a lot when I brought you here… Who knows what _he_ ’ll do if _he_ sees us talking? So – please let me finish while we still have time! Then, I’ll hide you in one of these empty houses and sneak back…’  
  
The Prisoner hastily scrambles together at least some semblance of composure and sets off again in Susie’s wake.  
  
‘All right, let’s go on with the tour!’  
  
Steadying her breath, Susie resumes her heart-rending tale, occasionally pointing out more signs of desolation,  
  
‘Once again, I am truly sorry about your aunt… But maybe… Just – just don’t think me cruel, please!.. Maybe, she was the luckiest one of us. Apart from her, everyone else is still alive, even though most of the others are even worse off than me. I can walk and talk, at least – but poor Gus is so feverish most of the time that he cannot even crawl out of bed, and our neighbours are far too weak to do their chores. That’s why everything is so abandoned now, and there’s dust and cobwebs inside every house. Those plants and lifestock that did not die when the sickness hit, wasted away from neglect, and the rotting smell made us feel even worse – but even so, we still live. It has been going on for many, many days; none of us have been cured, and none of us have passed on… We just stay like this, festering, like these awful things on our skin’.  
  
Now, _that_ is even more odd! A plague that comes out of nowhere and refuses to leave? What an astounding mystery! Wait, did she just call it that? Could she actually be capable of thinking of mysteries, right after getting told that her own aunt had killed herself? Is her Papa’s adventurer blood so strong – or is it just because that she is a callous murderer that cannot be bothered by grief when a family member dies?..  
  
No – she must not get side-tracked by her own dark thoughts again! Susie called on her, the Prisoner, because she thought she could help (the poor, sweet, trusting thing!). And she will have to do her best not to disappoint her!   
  
‘You keep mentioning a _him_ ,’ the Prisoner inquires, furrowing her forehead. ‘Who’s that _he_ , exactly? One of your… our neighbours?’   
  
‘No,’ Susie replies, a quivering, fearful undertone suddenly rippling through her voice. ‘He is a stranger; a man that does not look like anyone I’ve ever seen before! You may meet him soon enough – and when you do, you will be sure to recognize him. He has long, grey hair, and this sort of pointy beard…’   
  
She makes hasty, fretful gestures in the air, attempting to outline an imaginary portrait.  
  
‘His ears are large and leaf-shaped, sort of like a buck’s, and his skin is really dark, like cured leather. Oh, and his eyes – they are nothing like a regular man’s! Where our eyes are white, his are black like ink; and where our eyes are brown or green or blue, his are yellow, like shiny new coins!’  
  
The Stranger’s mouth makes a small O-like shape.  
  
‘Whoah! That sounds like a Bosmer! He’s a long way from home, then!’  
  
‘Bosmer means Wood Elf, right?’ Susie asks. ‘I suspected he was one, by the looks of him… At least, that’s how your father described Wood Elves, didn’t he? Oh…’ She cuts herself short. ‘Oh – I shouldn’t have brought up your father; I am so sorry!’  
  
‘It’s all right,’ the Prisoner reassures her. And, in a way, it actually is – even though the mention of her Papa still hurts, especially now that she’s brooded so much over Aunt Gervaise’s demise, she is now too absorbed by getting to the bottom of this plague business. Maybe – maybe she can even save her village! Maybe she can do something right for a change!  
  
‘Oh!’ Susie sighs in relief. ‘So, this elf… Orchendor his name is… He showed up along with another group of people… like us. They set up camp in Old Jules’ barn – you know, that huge place where we used to play in as kids, pretending like it was a castle or cave or whatever? Well, they just settled in there without being invited, and soon enough some of our folk have moved out of their homes to join them. They just sit around all day, and listen to Orchendor… He speaks like some sort of preacher; he says we have all been, uh, blessed by someone called Puree-ate… Or Pure-eyed… Or Perry… Perry…’  
  
‘Peryite!’ the Prisoner blurts out, her eyes beginning to bulge in astonishment.  
  
She has seen that name in books – that’s one of the Daedric Princes, the dread rulers of the realms of Oblivion; the Lord of Pestilence! Many legends hold him (or his followers) responsible for horrible epidemics that have laid waste to entire kingdoms! Oh dear gods, so her village has been cursed by a Daedra! The poor, poor people… Poor Susie, and Gus, and others… They do not deserve it! They do not deserve anything that has befallen them!  
  
‘Yes, Peryite!’ the other woman echoes. ‘Orchendor talks about him a lot; he says that this Peryite is our lord and master; that he will shelter and protect us and share his infinite wisdom – if we only just follow the, er, path set for us. He says that your aunt was blind and misguided, that she took her life because she thought this sickness was a curse, while it’s actually a… a “boon”. He keeps telling us, and those other people that came with him, that we all need to “embrace our boon” and go off with him to some place in Skyrim where Peryite has prepared a home for us’.  
  
The Prisoner clenches her fists. Gods, she hopes that all these years of sitting around, half-starved and cut off from sunlight and fresh air, have not left her too weak – because she will have to do a thing or two to that bloody elf first infected her village with a plague (she can bet the entire House of Krex that it was all his doing!) and is now trying to turn them into cultists!  
  
‘And do people listen to him?’ she asks brusquely.  
  
Susie sighs again.  
  
‘Unfortunately, yes. We’ve all grown so tired of just lying in our homes and rotting in our own skin – and what Orchendor promises us is so… so lovely… But I don’t trust him. Even his silver tongue won’t convince me that… that these things we’ve turned into are something blessed!’   
  
‘Ah, but you are blessed, child!’ a low, slightly accented voice joins in from around the corner. ‘And I will make you see that, before we all depart!’  
  
‘Oh gods, he’s found us!’ Susie mumbles weakly. ‘I did not plan as far ahead as this! I am bad at planning! You were always the one doing these sorts of smart things, Meme! Oh, please, please have a plan!’


	14. Chapter 14

Forsooth, Peryite’s boon is a heavy burden, and the rebirth of his chosen does not always pass smoothly. As he travelled along the strip of woodland at the foot of the Druadach Mountains, which rise between the provinces of High Rock and Skyrim, Orchendor occasionally ran into some problems with the new Afflicted – but in most cases, he managed to turn them to his advantage. As it happened, for instance, in the case of that old woman.  
  
He crossed paths with her shortly after his arrival into this hamlet, together with a sizeable flock of Afflicted that he had collected on his long and arduous journey in the service of the great Lord Peryite. He had just selected a large, abandoned barn for his charges to settle in (thankfully, most peasants in the vicinity seemed to have succumbed to the power of the Prince’s blessing, and they did not meet any resistance from them) – and after doing so, he decided to patrol the streets to check if everyone had undergone the glorious transformation; for, throughout all the years that he has pledged to his Daedric master, he has come across rather bothersome cases then the wave of the blessing passed over certain individual dwellings that stood a short way apart from the others.  
  
And it was during this inspection that he beheld a most curious sight. As he was walking by one of the cottages, he noted three grey headstones rising somberly over a small grassy patch at the back of its yard (it must have been shaded bright-green before, but the touch of Peryite’s blessing had changed its colour to pale yellow).  
  
Kneeling in front of the row of graves, swaying rhythmically from side to side, as though in tune with some mournful melody that was ringing through her mind, was an old woman. The tell-tale complexion pointed to her being one of the Afflicted, and Orchendor reasoned to himself that, if he were to spread Peryite’s word among the newly turned, he might as well start with her.   
  
As he approached the kneeling mourner, he heard her muttering something feverishly under her breath. His sensitive Bosmeri ears twitching, he slowed his gait and attempted to listen in more carefully; presently, he began to discern certain separate words,  
  
‘The sickness… It is seeping though my bones… Burning through my skin… I… I think I will join you soon… All of you… And then… You will talk back to me… You never talk back to me now… No matter how I scold you, you do not listen… Shame on you, making an old woman… feel… so… so lonely…’  
  
Realizing that the peasant was under the impression that Peryite’s blessing was going to claim her life, Orchendor hastened to correct her.  
  
‘Pardon me for interrupting your rites to the dead, child,’ he said solemnly (having spent several hundred years in Peryite’s service, he feels more than entitled to address any human as ‘child’, no matter how old and withered they might be).  
  
‘But you shall not be passing on to where these three lost souls now are,’ with that, he motioned towards the graves. ‘The mighty Peryite has decreed that you and your neighbours and the people from a smattering of other Breton villages be blessed by him. The plague that would have killed other mortals shall not cut short your existence; instead, it shall prolong it, year after year, always growing inside of you and blooming into the beautiful gift that Peryite has graced this world with. The fluids that are now bubbling inside your body, and will escape from it through your mouth from time to time, shall be harvested and turned into ichor, which will most definitely prove of great use in the rituals and incantations to honour the great Lord’.  
  
The old woman tore her dim, tearful gaze away from the graves, and looked straight at Orchendor. He remembers that look well, even now, after the passing of so many days; for he has seen it countless times before, in the eyes of other Afflicted: there was confusion there, and fear, and quite a bit of anger mixed in, too.  
  
‘Who are you?’ the blessed one demanded, her voice high-pitched and impatient. ‘Some sort of elf? Go away! We don’t suffer strangers here!’  
  
‘I am Orchendor,’ Peryite’s servant introduced himself, as he always does. ‘I have come here heeding the call of the Daedric Prince of Pestilence himself. My task is to shepherd you and the other Afflicted to the ancient ruins of Bthardamz, deep in the heart of the Reach, in the province of Skyrim. There, you shall find peace, and Peryite shall commune with you through me and give you guidance that will help you discover the extent of the boon granted to you!’  
  
He might have said something else, quoting the best, most eloquent parts of his own sermons – but the foolish child refused to listen.  
  
‘You have no right to order me around!’ she shrieked, rising heavily to her feet and shaking her fist in front of his face. ‘I don’t know who you are, or where you came from, but you are not taking me anywhere, you damned Daedra worshipper! I am staying here, where my family is buried! And I will not abandon their graves until the day I join them!’  
  
‘But do you not see?’ Orchendor persisted, beginning to lose his patience (yes, this particular Afflicted turned out to be far more spirited than he anticipated). ‘You will never join them now! You have been chosen to live on under Peryite’s benevolent gaze! Embrace your fate, child, and come with me! Come and join the rest of the Afflicted; some, I have already gathered in the old barn in this very village, and some must still be concealed within their homes, waiting to be summoned! Come! Your new life awaits!’  
  
He is more than certain that he spoke in the most impressive manner possible; but still, the foolish old woman remained unmoved by his persuasive skill. Instead of heeding his summons like any righteous Afflicted should, she bent down and grabbed a sturdy wooden cane that was resting at the foot of one of the headstones, over a carpet of withered wild flowers – and brandished it through the air, exerting her frail self to the utmost.  
  
This – this came as quite an affront. As the powerful Lord of Pestilence is his witness, even though he has seen his fair share of disagreeable Afflicted, Orchendor has never been openly assailed by one before! Such tenacious audacity could not go unpunished! Especially since, by defying him, the woman was defying Peryite himself!  
  
And it was then that it occurred to Orchendor – for, like most other members of the proud meric race, he possesses quite an astounding intellect – how to both dispose of the malcontent and gain a firmer standing among the rest of the Afflicted.   
  
Before the old woman could as much as land one blow with her makeshift weapon, Orchendor fired a spell at her – a simple blast of sizzling shock magic, which instantly put a stop to her heartbeat, without either putting her through any prolonged pain (not that it matters, for Peryite teaches to embrace and honour pain and suffering) or leaving any noticeable markings on her body. Then, after her stiff, lifeless body rolled down into the grass, Orchendor glanced around to make sure he was not being watched by any stray Afflicted that had gathered enough strength to wander outside their homes – and picked her up, her head dangling off his arm on a thin, wrinkled neck like that of a slaughtered, freshly plucked chicken.  
  
Retreating hastily out of the open area into the shade of the cottage wall, he scanned his surroundings for anything that could further his scheme. As it turned out, the old woman’s humble abode (greatly dilapidated, like most of the dwellings of the Afflicted) had a small bath house set a short walk away from it – and it did not take Orchendor too much time or effort to fling the corpse inside, light up the stove with a well-aimed fire bolt, and then retreat, using a telekinetic spell to manipulate the doors in a way that would make it seem like the hapless Afflicted had locked them on the inside.  
  
Brilliant – simply brilliant! If his Master was watching over him (and Orchendor ardently believes that he was), he had to be so pleased with his faithful servant!  
  
Of course, there might be still some lingering misgivings about finishing with the old woman so abruptly – after all, every single Afflicted is precious in Lord Peryite’s eyes. But Orchendor still reasons in favour of himself: first and foremost, such an obstinate child would have likely continued to remain deaf to the voice of reason, and would have muddled the minds of the other Afflicted and made them  stray off the path. And what is more, her death made an admirable example for Orchendor’s speeches to the flock. This, my children, he keeps saying, raising his eyes as though in search of divine inspiration, is the fate that befalls those who misinterpret the gift of Peryite. If you do not follow me, your caring shepherd, who is to say that you shall not meet the same end as poor, unfortunate Gervaise?  
  
Oh, yes – Peryite be praised! – he has successfully handled that unpleasant incident, growing ever so much closer to leaving for Skyrim at the head of a faithful flock that has put complete and utter trust in Peryite’s infinite wisdom – and into him, Orchendor, as that wisdom’s herald. But on the other hand, much as he loathes admitting it, there are still complications. There is still the matter of this girl.  
  
He thinks that she child’s name is Susanne; she has exhibited a most aggravating trend of ignoring most of the gatherings presided by Orchendor. Instead, while he was instructing her brethren in the teachings of Peryite, she has been skulking about, clearly plotting something. She is not like the old woman: she is not someone to shake a cane at him… But she is doubting, questioning – he can see it in her eyes. She has not accepted the glorious fate of an Afflicted, like most of the others have.   
  
If he were not so busy converting the majority of the village folk, he would have kept a close eye on her from the very start. And now, when he has finally found some time to patrol the streets (since, with so many Afflicted having seen the light, the need for his sermons is now far less urgent) – what does he see? He sees her lurking in the back streets, describing her blessed fate in such unseemly terms to… to the most beautateous creature that he has ever laid eyes on!  
  
As a follower of the dread Peryite, patron and master of all that have been touched by various maladies, Orchendor has always had… very particular tastes. The bland, boring, healthy men and women have never managed to capture his attention; he sees nothing intriguing in their rosy cheeks and ample amounts of flesh. At the same time, the Afflicted, glorious as they are to behold, never truly awoke the hunger within his body, either; but this – oh, this is a delightful feast!   
  
He has never before seen the woman that Susanne is now cowering behind, shivering so hard that her hood slips back, and stammering something about a ‘plan’.  She may have come from one of those remote dwellings that sometimes remain without a blessing. For she is not an Afflicted – no, her skin lacks the markings of Lord Peryite’s divine plague. Instead, it is tinted with beautiful, excitingly sickly shades of white, yellow and grey – and there are such wonderful purplish circles around her green eyes, and such rich, painterly shadows under her sharp cheekbones! She wears no clothes, save for a bizarre, flowery garment wrapped carelessly around her gorgeously emaciated body – and from beneath it, her frail collar bones and see-through limbs peek enticingly, as though she is teasing him, the wraith-like temptress!  
  
Mesmerized by the heavenly splendour of Susanne’s companion, a burning pulse spreading from his loins, Orchendor remains motionless even as the mysterious woman moves closer to him, a tiny flurry of magical snow dancing over her left palm and a crackling ball of flame bouncing over her right.   
  
‘Orchendor, I presume?’ she asks huskily, the sound of her voice sending an exhilarated shiver up Orchendor’s spine. ‘I have had three years to learn all sorts of spells from a very, very clever boy – and… and so help me, I will test them out on you, one by one, if you don’t cure everyone in my village, right now!’  
  
Ahh, so this glorious creature is against Peryite’s blessing? Orchendor raises his eyebrows, his interest piqued ever more, and continues his musings even as the woman thrusts her right hand forward and hurtles the fiery ball towards him (while Susanne mouths, ‘Oh, so this was your plan?’.  
  
The emaciated beauty may have studied magic for three years, but he has studied it scores of times longer; it takes him very little effort to dodge her spell, with his longing gaze still lingering on her mouth-watering features. For once, he does not blame her for not wanting to embrace Peryite – even he, the loyal, staunch Orchendor, would have hated to see the striking red coloration and yellow pustules to mar this perfect pallor. And this – this gives him yet another remarkably brilliant idea! As the one tasked with carrying out Peryite’s will and shepherding the Afflicted, he has some measure of control over the Daedra’s blessing. Thus, as the woman, groaning in frustration, attempts to freeze him with a touch of icy magic, he counters her spell with his own.  
  
The gust of magical flurry barely grazes Orchendor’s cheek, making tiny crystals of rime build along the flowing strands of his hair, but otherwise leaving him unscathed: the lovely stranger has missed again. He, on the other hand, manages to hit his target – a tiny droplet of white light breaks against the woman’s chest and spreads over her entire body in silvery ripples; she staggers back, staring blankly at her delightful, skeletal body, and exclaims,  
  
‘What in Oblivion have you done to me?!’  
  
Her outcry is accompanied by a small burst of lightning from her fingertips – with Orchendor extinguishes with a ward before it can pierce his body.  
  
‘I have shielded you from Peryite’s influence, oh beautiful stranger,’ he explains with a smile. ‘No matter how much time you spend among the Afflicted, you shall not become one of them. You may touch them, you may inhale their breath – you may even plunge your arms elbow-deep into their ichor; but you shall remain just as impeccably perfect as you are now. And for that,’ his smile grows even broader and, scarcely able to control himself, he passes his tongue over his lips, ‘And for that, I think some gratitude is due’.  
  
‘What?!’ the woman chokes, taking a few more steps back and conjuring up a thick, jagged shard of ice, which she raises in front of her as if it were a dagger. ‘What are you talking about, you crazed elf?!’  
  
‘I – I think he wants to lay with you, Meme,’ Susanne pipes in squeakily, retreating as far as she can from the ongoing magic duel. ‘I – I heard pretty much the same thing from one of the boys last year. When a man says you should be grateful for something, it usually means he wants to lay with you’.  
  
‘Gods!’ the stranger hastily weaves the air around her into a ward of her own with her shard-free hand – while waving the other hand in Orchendor’s face. ‘You – you are more sick than Susie and the others!’   
  
‘Aww,’ Orchendor drawls patronizingly, letting golden flame tongues twist round his fingers like jeweled rings. One touch of enchanted fire – and the woman’s icy dagger melts away, leaving but a few gleaming droplets of water on her open palm (ah, by Peryite, what wouldn’t he give to be able to lick them off!); another – and her ward is gone like vapour on a hot summer’s day.  
  
‘You want to play a little game of cat and mouse? Good – that will make things even more exciting!’  
  
‘Don’t talk down to me like that!’ the lovely thing looks absolutely livid now; she keeps firing spell after spell after spell; she rains large chunks of ice, seething flames, and humming shock charges upon Orchendor as though she were a walking thunderstorm (and oh, she is – she most definitely is, judging by the maelstrom of feelings that she stirs up within him!). ‘I am not your toy – I am here to help my people, to right the wrongs I did in the past! If you really saved me from this sickness – you! Will! Save! The! Others!’  
  
So much fire – he likes that. He will have so much fun with her later! He most certainly will – for he can tell that, for all her feisty resistance, she will not last for long. Her body is just too preciously fragile – and she is exhausting her natural magicka reserves most unscrupulously. It will not be long before she collapses – and then, she will be all his.  
  
It is not too long before Orchendor is proved right: after a few more circles across the deserted street, with him facing her and never failing to dispel her magic, she finally begins to stagger, her forehead glistening with sweat. He narrows his eyes, swallowing prickling saliva, and savours every tiniest detail of this wonderful sight; ahhh, the way the weakness slowly gets the better of her is exciting beyond measure! Finally, completely drained, the woman keels to the side, about to fall down; the meddlesome Afflicted Susanne rushes to her aid – but Orchendor is fast. In a flash of bright-purple light, he vanishes from the spot where he stood, and materializes again right behind the woman, so that she sinks into her arms.  
  
‘I have greatly enjoyed this game of ours,’ he murmurs into her ear, his fingers slipping underneath her makeshift tunic and feeling the ribs through her skin. ‘But now it is time to set it aside. Commendable as your heroics are, they will not undo Peryite’s work. I have used magic to shield you, and you alone. Now, accept what has been done, and revel in the moment as I do!’  
  
The woman shudders; her fretful companion, in turn, claps her hands against her mouth. The pale beauty turns her head to face her – and then utters words that do not make a lot of sense to Orchendor,  
  
‘I am sorry you have to see this, Susie. I wanted to do it the proper, adventurer-like way, like my Papa would have done. But it looks like the only thing I’m good at is let men make use of me. I – I will switch to Plan B’.  
  
‘What is Plan B?’ Susanne asks breathlessly.  
  
‘This,’ the woman responds, swallowing a lump in her throat, and then tilts her head so that Orchendor can press his parched, impatient lips against her exposed neck.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You may recall that, when the player is clearing out Bthardamz, they can hear the Afflicted talking to each other. One of these conversations (or rather, monologues) is a woman addressing her sleeping brother and telling him how she is sick and tired of this place, and how she hates what they are becoming, and how she longs for the fresh air of the Reach. Her words really moved me - so I decided to expand on her character a bit, and turn some things around in my imagination. And that is how Susie came into being.
> 
> Also a note on the elven adventurer: he is the Listener of the Dark Brotherhood in the same universe where Meme is the Dragonborn.

Poor, poor Gus. He, and so many others, just barely lasted through that long trek up the winding mountain path, with the wind whistling in their ears till their heads began to ache, and the slippery stones threatening to roll away from underfoot at every moment. So now, after they finally reached their destination – having trudged through narrow valleys in the shadow of tall, jagged rocks, past twisted, dried-up juniper trees and white, roaring waterfalls – all that the hapless soul ever does is sleep.  
  
Susie leans over her older brother, a wistful smile barely touching her lips, and rearranges his blankets. As she does so, she cannot help but notice, with a cold pang of pain, that the red of his cheeks and neck has grown even deeper, as though his skin has been peeled off to expose raw, bleeding meet. The pustules, too, have swollen in size so much that they are now bulging over his brow like grotesque horns, preventing her from seeing his eyes. She sighs mournfully and looks away, instinctively scratching her own burning sores.  
  
She can swear that this place – Bthardamz, is it? – is making her Gus, and everyone else, even sicker. It is a veritable underground maze, with heavy, oppressive stone walls and countless tiny chambers, hidden behind rows of cage-like bars and gleaming metal panels, which reflect the light of their campfires and make the heat that they emit even more sweltering. And there is all this noise, too – the constant clicking and pounding and grinding of some obscure machinery, which was set into motion by the ruin’s former masters, the ancient Dwarves, and is still working, trying to complete whatever task the deep-dwelling elves set for it, even though they are no longer there… kind of making Susie think of the abandoned houses back home; except that those were eerily quiet, and this place is so loud that at times she fears it will drive her mad.  
  
Ah, how she misses the fresh air of the Reach!.. That is the name of the part of Skyrim they are in, right? She thought she heard Orchendor say that. This long trek over the Druadach mountains, and then towards the Dwarven ruin, was the furthest she has ever been from home – and, miserable as she felt almost all of the time, surrounded by suffering at every turn, she could not help but sometimes gape around, taking in the lofty grey cliffs, with soft wisps of mist capping their tops like gigantic wads of cotton, and the cascading rivers, with tiny rainbows rising above them when the sun peeked through the gaps in the clouds.   
  
Now she thinks she can understand why the late Master Horacio – Arkay rest his soul! – found so much thrill in being an adventurer. Even though she enjoyed his stories tremendously when she was a child (either in his own telling, or in Meme’s loud, overexcited interpretation) she could never quite wrap her head around how big the world really was, until she actually left the familiar confines of her village… Ah, if only she could explore this great, boundless expanse a bit more! Perhaps with Meme and Gus?.. Wouldn’t it be just grand, the faithful sidekick siblings joining the daring adventurer’s daughter once again, just like when they were children, and all their kinsfolk were alive and well, and there was no Affliction gnawing away at their bodies?  
  
But ah, who is she kidding?! They are suck here, in this stifling stone prison, doing nothing but choking on acid-green vomit, which began to squirt out of their cracking mouths as the sickness advanced (Orchendor uses the lofty word ‘ichor’ to describe it), and gathering it into ancient dwarven urns for some purpose that none of them can quite explain, except ‘Peryite wills it’.  
  
Peryite, Peryite, Peryite… Susie has been hearing the Daedra’s name more and more often, both from her own neighbours, and from the people from the other villages that joined them along the way. And every next time, they seem to be pronouncing it with more and more reverence, their voices positively quivering with awe, like she never heard them quiver, even when they were talking about proper gods like Akatosh or Mara or Stendarr.  
  
They have even begun praying to him – just the other day, Susie caught Master Jean kneeling in the middle of a vast, empty stone chamber, and knocking his forehead again and again against the hard, carved floor, and chanting a repeated plea to make the Daedric Prince show himself and give him guidance.  
  
The disease seems to be seeping into their very minds, making them rot like their bodies do; they have begun forgetting their own names, and the names of the people around them – even Gus, during the rare moments when he is awake, does not address Susie in any way other than ‘sister’… Which would have been more than fine, if only he did not use the same word to call out to other women in the ruin! At times, a horrible, benumbing feeling building up in her heart, Susie even begins to suspect that he no longer recognizes her. None of them recognize each other, or even themselves; they have all become ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’, their features and voices all blending together into a single mass of red and green and yellow – the Afflicted. A horde of faceless, monstrous creatures that are barely clinging on to the last shreds of humanity.  
  
Susie has often wondered to herself why she has retained (most of) her sanity in the midst of this mumbling, groaning, ever-nauseous underground cult. Perhaps, it would have been a blessing, after all – to lose herself in delirium, to succumb to the rot inside her body, and to spend the rest of her days belching out this ‘ichor’ thing and trying to summon a Daedra Lord that cursed them with this malady and now does not care to answer?.. Perhaps she would have felt more at peace then... if she became like the others?  
  
But she did not – she still knows that she is Susie, and that man who is lying on the uncomfortable stone bed in front of her, breathing heavily in his sleep, is her brother Gus, born a year earlier than herself, in the month of Last Seed; she still remembers that, somewhere out there, in the closed-off heart of the stone maze, separated from her by dark corridors and enormous, roaring steam pipes, and scary traps sent by the ancient Dwarves to ward off intruders, is her friend Meme.  
  
Oh, Meme, Meme – maybe it is because of her that Susie has not yet slipped into the zombie-like stupor that has claimed so many Afflicted? Her mind is so consumed by fretting over her friend, that there is simply no room left for Peryite’s influence.  
  
When Meme did not manage to best Orchendor in their swift, frightening magical duel, she gave Susie one last, long look, shame and despair darkening her eyes – and then, gave herself to the elf, closing her eyes and biting deep into her lips while he did what he willed with her, panting and slobbering like a dog that smells its mate. As Susie gathered from the few fleeting conversations they had during the journey to Skyrim, Meme decided to play along with Orchendor’s lust in hopes of getting him to trust her and tell her more about his Daedric master’s plans, and to make it clear, once and for all, whether or not there was a way foil them.  
  
If she succeeded or not, Susie never found out, for soon after the Afflicted settled in inside the ruin, Orchendor retreated deeper into the Dwarven maze than any of them dared to reach (‘to commune with Peryite’, as he told them), and took Meme with him. Susie is too afraid to imagine what sort of… things he could be doing with her out there, and loathes herself for not being strong enough to get up, grab a torch or something, brave the traps, and rescue her friend from the elf’s vile clutches!  
  
When Orchendor allowed the Afflicted to make a stop and rest, and the two women sat down together, sheltered from the bitter wind by some shallow cave and cupping their hands round a tiny flame that Meme would cast to keep them warm – she would tell Susie about her plans, and sometimes a little bit about her past, and she would always sound so regretful, so bitter about herself. She would keep saying that what accepting Orchendor’s advances was low and cowardly – but Susie knew, and still knows, that it was very, very brave.  
  
Meme is so brave to bear the disgusting touch of that perverted Daedra worshipper, all for the sake of rescuing them all – and she was so brave to endure all those years of solitude in the House of Krex. She was brave to shake off the evil magic of that vampire that tricked her into killing her family, and she was brave to shoulder the burden of guilt when her father fell. She is, in fact, the bravest person that Susie has ever met – and nothing that she, Susie, can do will ever match up to the strength inside her friend’s heart.  
  
But she has still tried, many times, to be at least a little bit like Meme. For three years, she fought back superstitious fear and risked incurring the wrath of her fellow villagers, who had mostly been turned against Meme by her aunt, just to climb up that hill and leave food for her friend. For three years, she hoped against all hope that Meme was still alive, hiding somewhere in there; for three years, she told herself that by making these little drops in the cracks of the crumbling walls, she was saving her friend from starvation.   
  
She has always felt immensely honoured by earning the friendship of someone as wonderful and awe-inspiring as Meme, the daughter of an adventurer, the amazing, daring, smart girl who dabbled in the mysterious art of alchemy together with her Papa, and had all those fancy spellbooks lying about her home!   
  
She was more than happy to play the part of Meme’s adoring fan (or rather, part of a duo of fans, together with her brother). She was more than eager to help when Meme asked her to run some errand together. And she was more than delighted (to the point of squealing like an exceedingly happy, chubby piglet!) when Meme extended an offer to ‘hang out’.   
  
And that admiration still lives on within Susie – she just wishes she had more willpower to fulfill that desperate wish to become as heroic as her life-long idol…  
  
Susie would have mulled over her own inadequacy for much, much longer – but her attention is suddenly drawn to the sounds of a scuffle, coming from outside the small, cramped chamber shared by herself and her brother. Rising from her seat, she pokes her head cautiously around the corner – and clutches her disease-warped head in silent horror.  
  
It seems that a stranger has wandered into their underground shelter – perhaps, an adventurer like Master Horacio, intending to collect and sell whatever odds and ends the Dwarves left behind when they vanished from the face of Nirn. Just like Orchendor, this man is quite different from Susie’s kinsmen – but to say that the two of them are similar in appearance would not be true, either.   
  
The treasure-hunter (or whoever he is) also has large, pointy ears, but his skin is pale-grey, perhaps even with a slight tint of blue – like cold ash left in the hearth after the night-long fire has faded away – and his eyes are bright-purple. He seems younger than Orchendor, too - although it might not be possible to tell for sure, since they are both elves… just different, eh, species of them? In any case, Susie heard that elves can live for hundreds, if not thousands of years, so who knows how old this newcomer actually is. At any rate, his facial hair, trimmed into a neat little goatee, is not grey like Orchendor’s, but rather dark-brown, and so are the loose locks that have escaped from beneath his helmet… which, by the way, has to be the most beautiful pieces of craftsmanship that Susie has ever come across, just like the rest of his attire: the stranger is armoured from head to toe in a suit of glittering, gilded metal, with curious, exotic patterns that make Susie think of birds’ feathers.   
  
But, intriguing as this elf’s appearance is, it is not he who makes Susie gasp and claw fearfully at her blistering temples. It is the reaction of the other Afflicted to seeing him.  
  
As he walks down the sloping stone corridor, wrinkling his narrow, high-bridged nose at the rank smell of ichor (which now pervades the air in every part of Bthardamz that Susie has been to) and tapping his fingers carelessly against the sheathed weapon at his side, dark, crouching figures begin to stir in shadowy corners all around him. Presently, they emerge – and lunge themselves at him, letting out odd, gurgling, growling noises, like a pack of animals that has sensed an intruder in its den. The elf’s eyes flash, and he clasps his fingers round his blade’s hilt – but before he can pull it out, the Afflicted are already on top of him, squirming and wriggling in an enormous reddish ball, their pus-smeared limbs blurred and barely distinguishable.   
  
Susie’s heart sinks. Mara’s mercy – what are they doing?! The foul sickness has made them completely insane! Oh – oh no.. are they – are they trying to bite him? Yes, she can definitely see one of the Afflicted chewing that the elf’s armoured boot; it could be Jean, but it is so hard to tell now… They have all turned into beasts! Oh, curse that Orchendor! She hates him – she hates him so much! She hates what he’s turned them into!  
  
The wave of anger rises rapidly up Susie’s throat, scorching her and almost making her dizzy for lack of breath. Swept in its wake, without even thinking what she is doing, she grabs the very first object within her reach (it feels like an old copper plate, or something of the sort) and, with an incoherent shriek, throws it into the midst of the Afflicted.   
  
Her projectile does not do a lot of damage, of course – but, as it thunks against the head of one of the bloated, rasping monsters, it distracts the pack for a split second. This gives the elf enough time to scramble back to his feet and finally whip out his sword… no, swords! He had two of them strapped to either hip; Susie just did not notice the second weapon, as the wandering dungeon delver was mostly turned towards her in profile.   
  
As the stranger moves around, his movements graceful and fluid despite his armour’s apparent weight, his cuirass and his twin blades flash in the shimmering light of the fires and Dwarven oil lamps. Its bright glint slices at Susie’s eyes; she blinks, dazzled by the treasure hunter’s whirling war dance – and it is good that she does, too.  
  
Because the flare of the bared weapons is followed by a loud, ripe splurch, and then another, even louder, and then, a chorus of groans. Cringing and shrinking her head into her shoulders, Susie peers at the battlefield through her fingers, and can just barely see the Afflicted falling back and plastering themselves against the floor, their limbs twitching – until the elf leans over each of them and runs one of his blades deep into the heaving chest of each fallen creature.  
  
Soon enough, this cacophony of grunts, groans, and squelches of bleeding flesh proves too much for Susie to bear. Once again, she fails dismally at being as brave as Meme – by bending in two an uncontrollable sobbing fit.  
  
The piteous, spluttering sounds that she makes do not fail to capture the stranger’s attention; stepping over the scattered bodies, he approaches her cautiously, both of his weapons still drawn and dripping with dark, sticky blood.  
  
‘Well, that’s new,’ he remarks, cocking his head to the side. ‘You are the first one among these blighters who isn’t openly hostile! Are you planning to attack me any time soon? You know, I could always go into sneak mode and send an arrow through your throat to end your misery!’  
  
Susie makes a loud sniff and gapes at the elf.  
  
‘Is that what you are going to do?’ she asks weakly, wiping her nose with the back of her reddened hand. ‘The same thing that you did to them?’  
  
The elf lowers his blades slowly, his eyebrows raised, and lets out an emphatic exclamation in some unfamiliar language.  
  
‘B’wek! You can speak, too – and say something that isn’t a dumb prayer to Peryite! Oh, you are too interesting to kill! These fetchers were done for – but you…’  
  
‘Thank you!’ Susie says suddenly, her gaze open and earnest.  
  
She is still very wary of the elf – he is certainly very light-hearted for someone who has just carved his path through a crowd of people; that can’t be the hallmark of a good person – but she does mean her words of gratitude.  
  
‘Thank you for ending their lives; they – they stopped being themselves long ago, and if you hadn’t come, they would only have gotten worse’.  
  
The elf bends his torso in a slightly mocking bow.  
  
‘Always happy to oblige, muthsera – that _is_ what I do for a living, after all!..’  
  
With that, he straightens up again, and adds,  
  
‘Say, now that we’ve established a bit of a mutual understanding – could you point me to a bloke called Orchendor?’  
  
‘Orchendor?’ Susie echoes – and then utterly astonishes herself by adding, with the same light-hearted eagerness that, but moments before, made her suspicious of the pointy-eared stranger,  
  
‘Have you come to kill him?’  
  
The elf nigh on blinds her with a broad, pearly grin.  
  
‘That I have, my red-faced friend! And unless I am wrong, it looks like you would like to kick the s’wit in the shins yourself! Want to come with?’  
  
Susie bites into her thumb sheepishly.  
  
‘I – I don’t have a weapon…’  
  
(She does hope it sounded less embarrassing than ‘I don’t know how to fight’, or ‘I don’t even know why I said this!’!).  
  
The elf grins again.  
  
‘Now you do!’ he declares brightly, unstrapping one of his blades and handing it to Susie. ‘Don’t look so baffled! It’s really easy to handle – just stick ‘em with the pointy end, as the old saying goes! You can poke one of these stiffs to see how it works!’  
  
Susie swallows, a cloud of heat enveloping her and making her sweat. Gods, what was this thought she just had? How could she even consider?.. But what if, once he wakes up, he will become like them? A feral, mindless creature guided by uncontrollable rage?.. Doing him, setting him free before it’s too late – that would be merciful. And brave.  
  
‘Actually,’ Susie says, clearing her throat, ‘I want you to show me how to… stab someone. He is just behind that wall, sleeping. I – I don’t want him to feel too much pain, if that’s possible… He is my brother’.


	16. Chapter 16

She no longer calls herself the Prisoner, even though that name is still appropriate – for what is this endless ruin if not a prison, and one many times was than the House of Krex, with its soft (albeit more than a bit mouldy) carpets and little Festus’ familiar face greeting her from the picture frame? But at the same time, she feels that she is no longer worthy of referring to herself this way. A prisoner may be trapped, confined to cage, cut off from the rest of the world – but a prisoner still has dignity. And she does not: she has fallen far too low; she gave up back then, in the dusty, empty street, her strength and magicka ebbing, and now she is no longer the Prisoner. She is the Thing.  
  
Yes, that it the name she chose for herself when the elf withdrew with her into the furthest underground reaches of Bthardamz, leading her by the hand down stone bridges that crossed vast, cavernous lakes with water as black as tar, and through twisting passageways that were guarded by silent, colossal statues with serene, indifferent faces, which instilled a sense of false calm (she knew that the metal giants’ unmovable expressions were but an illusion of peace because it was one of such ancient Dwarven creations that chased after her father when he broke his leg… ah, but what does it matter).   
  
She is the Thing – Orchendor’s thing, the obedient, silent doll that he twists and turns around and dresses and undresses as he sees fit. She can recall that, somewhere in the mists of time, she used to bend to the will of the vampire trickster in precisely the same way – only then, she at least had the excuse of being turned into a thrall. Now, however, she has done this to herself willingly, thinking that it would be an easier way to help the cursed villagers than trying to win a magic duel. All because her stupid, worthless body, worn almost to nothing after three years of imprisonment, refused to last through the spar with Orchendor for as long as she needed!  
  
If she has known then how much humiliation her thrice-damned Plan B would entail, she would have set herself ablaze with one of that clever boy’s spells, and allowed it to reduce her body to smoking ash! Because her foolish, unforgivable attempt to glean more insight into Orchendor’s plot by pandering to his whims, has resulted in nothing – absolutely nothing!  
  
No matter how patiently she has endured the elf’s advances; no matter how steadily she has held her breath while he was fingering her, shutting her eyes and striving to wipe her mind completely blank; no matter how readily she has agreed to being purposely starved in order to retain her ‘pale beauty’ – he has not told her what she wanted to hear! Even at those moments when Orchendor grew completely inebriated by his own lust, and it felt like he would confide anything in her, his ‘heavenly delight’ – even then, he refused to explain how to cure this blasted ‘Affliction’!   
  
All that she has managed to find out is that the elf was supposed to ‘harvest’ as much vile green vomit as possible from the hapless plagued peasants, and then use it to spread Peryite’s curse even further – but for some reason, his Daedric master refuses to let him know when exactly to begin his foul rituals, or where the disease is supposed to spread. And with no instructions from his Lord, Orchendor passes the time as best he can, alternating between casting twisting, glowing green runes on the floor in an attempt to draw attention from Oblivion, and entertaining himself with his Thing… Oh, and sleeping, of course.  
  
This is what he is doing now, curled up on the floor of the murky, high-ceilinged hall that he has secluded himself in. His long, unkempt grey hair is spread over the head of his simple, patched bedroll, and his fingers are still clutching a slip of withered parchment with an invocation to Peryite scribbled over it, with ominous-looking Daedric runes marking the margins. He has been praying to his Lord all day, and did not even allow himself some… playtime. Perhaps it is because of this that the Thing does not feel her usual resentment when she looks at him.   
  
Somehow, his face looks different when he sleeps; without the hungry glimmer in his eyes and the twisted leer on his lips, he almost resembles some wise, benevolent elven sage from an old story. Perhaps, long ago, he actually _was_ different? Perhaps it was all Peryite’s fault for turning him into what he is – a lecherous demon worshipper with a tainted mind, who delights in the sight of putrid, sickened flesh and gets aroused by malnourished women? Perhaps the Daedra Lord has corrupted him, just as he has corrupted the Afflicted?.. Or perhaps it is her, the Thing, who is turning into a mindless, groveling slave and is ready to see the best in her tormentor, just as she was ready to see the best in… the vampire?   
  
As she watches him, Orchendor’s serene, blissful expression suddenly turns into that of uncontrollable dread; his thin, angular eyebrows slide together, the furrowed folds of skin overshadowing his eyes; his breathing intensifies, and a small moan escapes his lips as they part slightly, exposing the tips of his teeth in a snarl – the sort of snarl, as the Thing tells herself, that a hunter might see when cornering a wounded wolf.  
  
After a few moment of lying like this, his limbs jerking uncontrollably, Orchendor snaps awake, and clambers awkwardly in a sitting pose, staring right ahead, with his black-rimmed eyes blank and unseeing.  
  
The Thing, who has begun to withdraw from Orchendor in alarm, is not quite certain if he is aware of her presence: when he finally speaks, it is unclear whether he is talking to her or to himself,  
  
‘He… He spoke to me… Peryite spoke to me! Oh stars, what have I done?!’  
  
He draws a loud, wheezing breath of air – and suddenly, his eyes focus on the Thing, blazing with livid anger.  
  
‘You!’ he shrieks, staggering to his feet and sending a lightning bolt lashing through the air like a long, slithering purplish-white whip.   
  
It wraps around one of the Thing’s ankles, leaving a raw, red mark, and making her drop down to her knees; then, it snakes back towards its caster, trailing over the stone floor in a long, fine thread. Along the way, its light keeps growing fainter and fainter, until it finally dissolves and Orchendor has to cast the spell anew.  
  
‘You miserable wretch!’ he continues screaming at the Thing, closing in on her, with another charge of shock magic sizzling in his grasp, ready to be unleashed. ‘You seduced me with your tempting emaciated look – and now, because of you, my Lord is angry! He manifested himself to me in my dream, his glorious dragon-like form shaped out of countless scale-tailed skeevers – and he said that by shielding you from his blessing, I have strayed from my path… And that now, my life is forfeit!’  
  
His loud, enraged words, spoken in a voice that is warped almost beyond recognition, are accompanied by a new lash of the crackling whip. This time, it slices at the Thing’s back, burning a hole in the black robe that Orchendor gave her to wear instead of her curtain tunic (mostly because, unlike the curtain, the robe has a rope-like belt, and the elf would derive boundless pleasure from untying its knot). The sudden whiff of acrid smoke from the singed cloth makes the Thing cough loudly; this seems to infuriate Orchendor even more.  
  
‘What are you, sobbing?’ he asks shrilly, preparing to whip her with magic for the third time. ‘Do you want to stir pity within me? How dare you – it is me who deserves pity, and no-one else! I have invoked the wrath of the mighty Lord Peryite – and it is all your fault! You corrupted me, you worthless human! You corrupted me!’  
  
Gods, just listen to him: his hysterical tirade echoes her own thoughts about him, when she peering into his face while he slept! Only according to him, _she_ is the source of his corruption! And to think, she was this close to sympathizing with the blighted elf! Oh, she might have been a weak, trusting fool before, when she let a creature of the night turn her into a tool of revenge, and when she let Orchendor use her as it pleased him – but no longer!  
  
The third blast of destructive magic does not hit its target; the Thing has mustered all of her strength to leap to her feet and to dodge the incoming spell. Truth be told, thanks to Orchendor’s efforts to keep her ‘deliciously skeletal’, she is still just as frail as she was when she first emerged in the light of day, if not more so – but this time, she is not going to give in. This time, she will make a stand to the last; and even if her body betrays her like it did last time, she will still keep fighting back; she will strain herself to replenish her magicka till blood begins to stream out of her mouth. If one of Orchendor’s spells kills her, so be it. After all that she did, to others and to herself, she does not deserve to keep walking the plane of Nirn; but by choosing which way to die, she will at least reclaim some of her lost dignity.  
  
Now, to put the clever boy’s journals to good use!  
  
‘So, it’s my fault, is it?’ she asks, drawing a deep breath and beginning to circle around Orchendor, mirroring their confrontation in the empty streets of the plagued village. ‘It’s my fault that you are so perverted that even your master disapproves?! Why, thank you for enlightening me, oh great Orchendor!’  
  
Each one of her sarcastic quips is punctuated by a blast of flame; usually, her magical projectiles collide in mid-air with the elf’s spells, showering both of them in white-hot, stinging sparkles. Worn out by not getting enough food and having to sate the elf’s urges, the Thing soon begins to feel dizzy again – but, true to her mental oath to herself, she ignores the mounting sickness within her and clenches her teeth so tight that they begin to grind audibly against each other, never ceasing to charge up new flame and shock bolts. Sometimes, she manages to hit the elf, causing him to stagger back slightly and hastily cloak himself in a shimmering, greenish-blue protective barrier that absorbs the next few blasts of mage fire. Seeing him reel makes the Thing jeer triumphantly – but so does seeing him succeed; for every time she does not prove fast enough, and gets hit by an incoming spell, she feels the same masochistic delight that overcame her when she subjected herself to the torture of painful memories. Let him scorch her with fire; let him leave deep gashes in her skin with razor-sharp pieces of enchanted ice; let him try to stun her with blinding shock bolts! This will be a valuable lesson; this will show her the consequences of giving herself to a man – again!  
  
She does not know how long their new duel lasts; there are so many things to do, so many spells to cast and to dodge between one heartbeat and the next, that time seems to have become suspended, frozen; it may still exist somewhere out there, beyond this chamber, in the dank, steam-filled corridors where the Afflicted roam – but here, all the cogs and wheels have ground to a halt. Here, nothing matters but the elven mage and his rebelling Thing, and their eternal, deadly dance on the opposite sides of the stone chamber, which the woman finds ever more exhilarating than all of the thrusts and pushes of this man’s body.  
  
The outside reality does come bursting in again, eventually; it makes itself known to the sparring duelists with the arrival of two strangers on the scene. One of them calls out, in a voice that the Thing does not recognize,  
  
‘Hey! What do you think you are doing, starting without us?!’  
  
And another adds, in a rather tremulous tone,  
  
‘I… I still don’t really know how to hold this sword!’  
  
Now _that_ voice is familiar; very, very much so. It makes the Thing snap out of the hypnotic trance of the battle, and swivel her head, her eyes rounding,  
  
‘Susie?! You foolish girl, why did you come here?!’  
  
Susie draws, who is standing on the chamber’s threshold, overshadowed by some grey-skinned elf in gilded armour, draws herself up to her full height and points at the bold, dark-red lines, traced over her eyebrow and underneath her eye – one of the few places where her skin is not quite as red.  
  
‘Do you see this, Meme?’ she asks, slowly building up composure. ‘It’s my warpaint. I drew it with my brother’s blood, after slitting his throat in his sleep. If I hadn’t, he would have turned into a mindless beast and torn me to shreds, like the other Afflicted tried to do with this man here. That’s why I came. I hate what we’ve become. I want out. I want this to end’.  
  
The Thing feels her blood draw away from her heart – and then come rushing back in a flaming tidal wave. By all the gods that care to listen, Orchendor will pay for this! Orchendor will… Wait…  
  
‘Where – where is Orchendor?’ she asks, swirling on the spot in confusion. The place where, but a few moments ago, the accursed Daedra worshipper stood, ready to hurtle yet another glowing orb at her, is now completely empty.  
  
‘Excellent question,’ the gilded elf remarks, frowning. ‘I could have sworn there was someone else here when we came in. He doesn’t happen to know Te…’  
  
Before he can finish pronouncing the word ‘Teleportation’ (much less adding a tag question at the end), a cloud of purple smoke suddenly swells all around Susie, its wisps wrapping themselves round her waist and wrists like the tendrils of some carnivorous plant from the lands of the Wood Elves – and when the cloud disperses, Orchendor steps out of it, holding out a shard of ice like a dagger, just as the Thing did while confronting him, eons and eons ago.   
  
‘You have always been the most bothersome member of the flock, have you not?’ he hisses into the Afflicted woman’s ear, pressing the icy blade deep into the skin of her throat, so that it makes several pustules pop, squirting the rancid yellowish liquid in all directions. Some of it gets into the eyes of both the Thing and the elven stranger, rendering them disoriented and buying Orchendor time to continue with his villainous monologue.  
  
‘Maybe if I deal with both you and your conniving friend, I will win back some of my Master’s favour… You wanted this to end – and now your wish will be granted!’  
  
The other elf and the Thing manage to wipe the pus out of their eyes just in time to see Peryite’s servant drive the ice shard deep into Susie’s throat.


	17. Chapter 17

‘All right, Twiggy – this is it,’ the grey elf says after the noise of the Dwarven elevator finally stops grinding at their ears. ‘We made it to the surface. Do you still want to get on with it?’  
  
‘Yes,’ the gaunt human woman says, nodding firmly. ‘She would want that. I know she would’.  
  
Side by side, they step off the enormous octagonal stone platform that carried them out the bowels of Bthardamz; they unlocked access it to the key that the woman found on Orchendor’s body when they inspected it – it was rather ironic, really; if she had been more resourceful, she would have pickpocketed it from him long ago, while he was distracted by his own passion or by a desperate wish to contact Peryite, and made a run for the surface whenever she wanted to. But – what is done it done. She and the stranger have finally gotten out of this dark, miserable place; they are standing on the top of a rock, a sweeping view of the mountain valley spreading out beneath their feet as far as the eye can see till its contours get blurred beneath a thick veil of mist; it is all over.  
  
Yes, it is all over. Orchendor finally lies dead – punished for what he did, but not in the name of Peryite.   
  
The name of the vile Lord of Pestilence was never uttered after Susie had sunk down to the floor, a stream of blood encircling her neck like a jeweled collar, glistening with a garland of dark rubies.   
  
Instead, when the enraged woman lunged at the elf, a lightning bolt sizzling between her claw-like fingers, she screamed the name of her fallen friend; the servant of Peryite barely managed to shake her off, his face crisscrossed by magicka burns. When he finally pushed her back, making her drop down to the floor, he sent an enormous gust of icy wind blowing over her head, which chained the woman to the spot where she had fallen, locking her underneath a silvery crust of rime – but that was when the grey-skinned dungeon delver came in.   
  
While Orchendor was busy casting his ice spell, the other elf had crept away to the chamber’s corner and, switching from his blade to the exquisitely crafted gilded bow that was strapped to his back. Steadying his breath, he whisked out an arrow from a small, narrow quiver at his side, took aim, his pupils widening to take in as much light in the dim chamber as possible – and then, released the string.   
  
Swift and unerring, the arrow reached Orchendor just as he was getting ready to run another ice shard through the chest of his trapped adversary; it entered the back of his neck at a sharp angle and, with a loud crunching noise, pierced his head so that its tip exited out of the mouth that once uttered mesmerizing words to sway the Afflicted into leaving for Skyrim.   
  
And when Orchendor first sagged to his knees and then limply bent over backwards, a spluttering crimson fountain shooting out of his throat, the grey elf did not think to invoke Peryite, either. After coming up to the fallen cultist and giving him a small kick to free the path towards the ice-shackled woman, the gold-armoured interloper gave the corpse one last, long look, and said sternly,  
  
‘That, Sera Orchendor, was for all those poor sods you turned into shambling red-faced zombies’.   
  
After this little farewell, he took to chipping off some of the ice with his blade, allowing the woman to free her limbs just enough to cast a fire spell and melt off the rest of her rimy tethers.  
  
And now, here they are, two strangers brought together by a shared victory, carried by the age-old dwarven mechanism towards the sorely-needed fresh air. The grey-skinned, brown-haired, purple-eyed dungeon-crawler and the skeletally thin, famished prisoner of the Dwarven ruin, whom the elf has just taken to calling ‘Twiggy’ due to the almost painful frailty of her limbs (she does not object too much; this is not the worst of the names that could be applied to her).   
  
But they did not go up on the elevator alone – not truly. Clasped tight in the elf’s arms, is the lifeless body of the slain Afflicted; as the two companions walk a few steps away from the platform, he lays her down gently on the rocky ground and, crouching by her side, hovers his hands over her body.  
  
‘Mind you, this is one of the very few spells I have ever bothered to learn, when my father managed to drag me away from the feast table by the ear and forced me to read some books. And it’s not an awfully high-level one, either,’ he remarks over his shoulder. ‘So it will likely only last for a few minutes, tops’.   
  
‘That will be enough’, the woman reassures him.  
  
‘All right then!’   
  
The elf clears his throat and, half-closing his eyes, begins to move his hands about in slow, rhythmic, entrancing semi-circles. Presently, rays of soft blue light begins to emanate from his fingertips, lacing eerily through the crisp mountain air and travelling down to the dead body, seeping through the cold, gnarled flesh, which has now changed colour from red to greyish-purple, and highlighting every vein underneath the blistered skin with a pulsing glow. When this glimmering net entwines the Afflicted from head to toe, the elf makes an abrupt upward gesture with his hands, and, borne aloft by some unseen force, the corpse appears to get to its feet of its own accord, swaying slightly, but otherwise quite steady. The watching woman barely holds back a gasp when the Afflicted turns her head towards her and opens her eyes. She does it abruptly and a little bit unnaturally, like a mechanic doll – but this does not diminish the staggering effect of the elf’s magic.  
  
‘Me… Meme?’ she says slowly, her voice sounding oddly distorted, as though she is speaking in chorus with some unseen man.  
  
The living woman bites hard into her thumbnail, her eyes growing red and moist.  
  
‘Meme… What is happening? I – I thought I died…’  
  
She who she called Meme gnaws at her nail even harder, her chest heaving. It appears that she wants to say something, but is having a hard time finding the right words.   
  
The elf, however, is less hesitant.  
  
‘I am afraid you did die, my brave little friend,’ he says with a sigh, getting back to his feet and dusting himself off. ‘But Twiggy here asked me to use some good old dark magic to say goodbye’.  
  
‘You did?’ the reanimated Afflicted asks, her face breaking into a smile (a rather unnerving one, what with this ghostly bluish lighting). ‘Oh Meme, thank you so much! You are the best friend ever!’  
  
‘No I am not!’ Meme blurts out, clenching her fists. ‘ _You_ are the best friend ever! You have always been there for me, even when I was locked away – and I took you for granted! When we were children, I treated you like a sidekick; and now, I could not save you, not even after you burst in to fight Orchendor like this, barely armed, suffering from the plague – just to help me!’  
  
At this point, the pitch of her voice rises dramatically, and the streams within her eyes finally begin to overflow.   
  
‘I have failed you, Susie! I always fail everyone who matters to me! But… But at least with you, I got this final chance… to say I’m sorry…’  
  
‘Don’t be sorry!’ Susie pleads, clasping her glowing hands over her chest. ‘I – I was just trying to be brave, like you! Because…’  
  
She pauses for a second, and then asks, her echoing voice quivering,  
  
‘Can I… Can I tell you something?’  
  
Meme nods, passing her hand over her face to wipe her tears.  
  
‘You see – I… I have always admired you, and your father, so, so much… And when I caught a glimpse of the Reach, I thought it would have been lovely for you and me to travel the world like he did… to live out those stories that enchanted me as a little girl… And also – and also… I may have been a little bit in love with you’.  
  
Meme stares at the raised corpse in front of her, looking thoroughly baffled.  
  
‘B-but…’ she stammers, ‘B-but… What about Bastian?’  
  
‘I don’t know,’ Susie says frankly, ‘That’s why I never told you – I was confused about my own feelings. Almost everyone in the village crushed on poor Bastian something fierce, didn’t they? And I thought I did too… I mean, all young girls are supposed to crush on pretty boys, right? But then – then there were you; my best friend; the most wonderful person in the whole world… I – I don’t think I ever had any thoughts about kissing you or anything, but – but you have always meant so much to me; just being around you, just hearing you speak or laugh, made me feel so very happy! And when they took you to the House of Krex, it felt like my whole life had come crushing down. And when I sneaked food to you, I always imagined you in there, somewhere inside, only separated from me by a wall; because I could not bear the thought of you not being around any longer… And that is what love is, isn’t it – always wanting the one you love to be near you, and to be safe and sound?’  
  
‘It… It could be,’ Meme says chokingly, turning away from Susie’s pallid, glow-streaked image. ‘I – I don’t know what love is; I thought I did, once, but I was wrong… And in the end, it doesn’t really matter – because I am going to lose you anyway’.  
  
‘Please don’t be like that!’ Susie implores, arching her eyebrows anxiously. ‘It may be love, or it may be something else – but I do want you to be safe and sound and happy! You will be happy, won’t you, Meme? Please?..’  
  
She want to add something more; she wants to keep pleading – but just as she tries to say a few more words, the blue light that holds her image together flashes brightly, and then goes out; and without the magic to sustain it, the reanimated body crumbles into soft, flaking ash, which is swept off by the wind, while Meme reaches out after it, her face twisted by pain.  
  
‘There, little Susie,’ the elf says quietly, watching the ash travel towards the darkening sky. ‘You can now see the world…’  
  
‘And what about me? What am _I_ going to do?’ Meme asks in a half-hushed, monotonous voice, her gaze fixed somewhere on the far point on the horizon, where the first stars are just beginning to appear.  
The elf grins genially and gives her a pat on the back.  
  
‘You can always see the world, too! I suppose that first, you and I will have to do something about these Afflicted fellows: maybe put down the rest of them and then torch the place to destroy that foul-smelling vomit of theirs? I was talked into going to this miserable ruin by a rather odd Khajiit fellow; he hinted that there might be a reward involved if I report Orchendor’s death to Peryite – but after seeing what those poor sods were reduced to, I say hang the reward! I may not have a lot of scruples left, but they are still in there, and they are positively screaming right now!.. And then…’  
  
He rolls up his eyes and sweeps his arm dramatically in front of himself.  
  
‘Then, after we flip the bird to old Peryite, I can take you to Markarth – I was heading there anyway to, uh, talk to a business associate of mine, but got side-tracked. The local priestesses of Dibella will give you, little Twiggy, the make-over of a lifetime! And you will have to bathe in the cleansing waters of their shrine, too; that old lecher may have protected you from the Affliction, but who knows what sort of rotten stuff he may have passed on to you while you were at it! Can’t trust a follower of the Daedric patron of disease, now can you? And after you are all cleaned up and healed and prettified, you can head out wherever you want!’  
  
Meme hangs her head on her chest and mutters darkly,  
  
‘As if it’s that easy! There is no place for someone like me anywhere…’  
  
The elf’s eyes glint with curiosity.  
  
‘Define _someone like you_ ’.  
  
Meme gives him a long, intent look, and, clenching her teeth, brings herself to confess,  
  
‘Someone who killed her entire family’.  
  
The elf’s reaction is nothing like what she might have anticipated.  
  
‘Really?!’ he exclaims gleefully, clapping his hands together. ‘Well, that is even better! I know just a place where you will find shelter – a sanctuary that welcomes those for whom there’s no place anywhere else! And with those wicked skills in Destruction magic that I’ve caught a glimpse of, you’ll even get a job for yourself, especially after you’ve honed them a bit!’  
  
‘Does this job… happen to involve killing people with Destruction magic?’ Meme asks slowly, narrowing her eyes.  
  
The elf nods so energetically that his helmet almost falls off.  
  
‘And you are astute, too! Oh, Astrid will like you! So – what do you think?’  
  
She shrugs.  
  
‘I have already fallen very low, haven’t I? Taking others’ lives seems like a fitting trade for the likes of me…’  
  
The elf chuckles.  
  
‘That’s the spirit! Now, there are some things that you will probably need to know… Most importantly: if you see a jester’s hat lying around – don’t touch it; don’t attempt to try it on, no matter how tempted you will be. Just leave it alone – if you value your life, that is the most prudent thing you can do. Then, there’s the matter of Nazir’s cooking – yes, there’s this Redguard called Nazir, and he cooks; but the stuff that he cooks miiiiight cause steam to come out of your ears, so…’  
  
And together, him talking, her listening, they head off into the night.


End file.
